Anachronism to the max…
Transcript
Ahh it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these, it’s good to be back. I feel like ever since the start of the year, and I settled into a regular release schedule, I’ve just been complaining. Sometimes jokingly, and sometimes distinctly not jokingly, but still just whining. And it doesn’t feel like me. There’s a weird spiral of negativity that YouTube forces creators into, feeding into our insatiable thirst for a dunking, but we’ll get into that on another video down the line.
For now, I wanna get back to the main reason I started doing YouTube videos in the first place – talking about films that I love. In that spirit of nostalgia and pure, simple joys, my mind was taken back to adolescence, to the films I enjoyed as a wee lad in the 2000s. And one immediately jumps to the fore: the rock, the hard place, the one-of-a-kind comedy period sports film, A Knight’s Tale.
A Knight’s Tale is a 2001 film written and directed by Brian Helgeland, centred around the 14th century jousting scene. It follows a young squire, William (played by the late, great, Heath Ledger) who impersonates his knight after his sudden death, and rises up through the ranks in jousting tournaments throughout England, accompanied by a motley crew of misfits, courting the lady Jocelyn (played by Shannyn Sossamon (in her first movie role no less)) and eventually coming up against the villainous Count Adhemar (played by Rufus Sewell), who he must defeat in a joust whilst maintaining his secret identity.
The story is basically about this plucky up-and-comer, pulling himself out of the dirt through skill, yes, but mostly sheer determination and refusal to give up, facing seemingly unwinnable odds, whilst juggling romance and friendship outside of his spor- it’s Rocky. This movie is just Rocky with a very significant paint job. But I’d argue that’s actually a case of multiple discovery – you know, when two cultures invent the same thing without any sharing of ideas.
Now, we could spend all day going back in time through Western underdog narratives, looking at Jesus and the 300 Spartans – god, that would be an amazing name for a Spanish men’s choir – but we’re not gonna spend all that time on a history lesson. The relevant thing that I want to point out is that, ever since World War II, the UK bloody loves an underdog movie.
It turns out that it’s quite hard to reconcile thinking you’re the world’s protagonist, whilst also having, up until very recently, been an empire that dominated much of the world with colonialism for hundreds of years, so the British people were more than glad to embrace this narrative of the little guy standing against overwhelming odds after the Nazis fucked half of Europe and bombed the shit out of us for about a year. Stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, chicken tikka masala, dick in the vagina, spam bacon sausage and spam – all of that is just desperate propaganda to fuel our enemies to lovers arc with the USA.
We also needed a way to somehow still feel proud despite our ever-increasing irrelevance on the world stage, so while the Americans have settled on romanticising our imperial days in the media equivalent of gently patting the hand of your forgetful elderly relative after they tell you about how admirable Queen Elizabeth was for the 900th time, we coped by falling in love with the heartwarming British underdog sports film. You might recognise some recent iterations like Eddie the Eagle or The Phantom of the Open, but we’ve been doing this for decades.
A mostly incompetent hero enters a professional competition that they’re wholly unsuited for, and they may or may not actually win the tournament, because what’s important is they win the love of the crowd, and the respect of their peers. It allows us to continue to sit on our high horse despite not being the best at literally anything, whilst also engaging in a Cretian bargain to annually sacrifice a talented white boy who does strange American accents, in order to appease our new gods and their feral hunger for crumpet twinks.
Now, A Knight’s Tale was written and directed by an American, so Rocky was probably the closer influence, but it’s speaking to a very British sentiment, so that description is a bit short-sighted in my opinion. My evidence for that is how many of my peers hold this film near and dear to their hearts. I’ll occasionally quote lines and, unprompted, relative strangers will start going GEEELDERLAND, GELDERLAND GELDERLAND.
I think that not only is A Knight’s Tale is one of the best underdog films ever made, the film itself is an underdog, massively underrated by critics and audiences of the time, and kept alive by a cult of 21st century Brits.
Where do I even start with this thing? If you haven’t seen the film before, the cast is what’s probably been immediately catching your eye. Remember that this came out in 2001, and it very much has the vibe of ‘before they were famous’. Sure, Rufus Sewell was known for Dark City and Heath Ledger for 10 Things I Hate About You, but this was long before either The Man in the High Castle or The Dark Knight, where they would truly become legends. This is also insanely early in the careers of both Alan Tudyk and Paul Bettany, and nowadays one of them’s an Avenger, and the other one voices seemingly every cartoon animal or robot.
I turn into such an IMDB factoid machine when I’m watching this movie with anyone. Laura Fraser there, that’s Lydia from Breaking Bad. James Purefoy here’s been in all sorts people would recognise, from The Following to Altered Carbon to blockbusting hit film Solomon Kane god what a throwback. You might also recognise Mark Addy AKA Game of Thrones’ own Robert Baratheon AKA Bobby B. This is Bérénice Bejo’s first American movie role, and she’d go on to get nominated for an Oscar for The Artist.
It’s honestly amazing to see such a confluence of talent in this one film, years and years before all of these people would be household names. But just recognising them is one thing – how are the performances? Legendary, is what they are.
Through a combination of solid writing and iconic performances, basically every single character is a unique and hilarious delight. Roland is the best big brother type, Kate is always done with everyone’s bullshit, and we’ll go over Jocelyn later, but she delivers some dynamite lines.
Rufus Sewell absolutely shines here as the complete piece of shit Adhemar. He’s everything hateful: he’s rude, imperiously upper-class, misogynistic, bloodthirsty, and worst of all, he’s a no-good dirty cheater. Sewell plays him with this kind of flat-eyed mask that’s barely concealing a sadistic rage.
Besides the actor’s screen presence, everything else about the production is screaming villain at you in such an over-the-top way, long after it’s made apparent what a bastard he is, from his evil-looking armour and fist lances, to his goated musical motif, to his banshee-like screaming fans. He’s a real villain’s villain, and I love him all the more for it.
Tudyk plays his simple-minded character Wat with a kind of shaking, incoherent rage that’s incredibly endearing, especially when he’s paired up with the man himself, Geoffrey Chaucer. Yes, that Geoffrey Chaucer, the guy what wrote the actual Canterbury Tales. Although I should note that this film bears zero resemblance to the originals, and Brian Helgeland said that he imagined the film as the events that inspired Chaucer to write the actual Tales.
By the way, read the Canterbury Tales; The Miller’s Tale in particular is one of the funniest things ever written. I feel like a lot of people have this idea that all literature from the past is dry and deadly serious, but Chaucer might be one of the baudiest, filthiest motherfuckers outside of AO3 to ever write.
Anyway, in this film, played by the wonderful Paul Bettany, Chaucer absolutely steals the show. No easy feat, given all the other big personalities and pitch-perfect performances. He’s a guy who’s way too smart for his own good, and way too openly contemptuous of people he finds less intelligent than himself, which along with his massive gambling addiction, continuously gets him in trouble.
The fact that he’s introduced to us walking naked down the road, confusing all the barely-literate peasants with his verbose language, before launching into a monologue about the verb ‘to trudge’, tells you everything you need to know about him. Chaucer and Wat are brilliant foils for one another, with a classic brains and brawn antagonism between them that results in some of the movie’s best jokes.
But by far, the highlight of his character is the massive, dramatic speeches he gives to announce Will before his matches. These things are a delight, really the perfect expression of a full-of-himself writer who feels creatively stifled. Bettany delivers them with all the verve and showmanship of a WWE wrestler with a literature degree.
It’s the best running joke of the film, with Chaucer initially surprising and confusing the crowd with his unusual style, but after the team become famous, milking these moments for all they’re worth, the audience hanging on his every word. Well, everyone except Wat.
As I understand it, these speeches were written really late in the game. I’ve read the original 1999 script and it’s nothing like the final product. Thank god this happened because I don’t know what my life would’ve happened been like without them. The phrase, “we walk in the garden of his turbulence” lives in my head rent-free.
The film is full of little character moments, like Adhemar’s manservant trying to copy Chaucer’s grandiose speeches, but they keep distracting him with a mirror like a bunch of kids. They really go a long way in making these characters feel like genuine people, selling this idea of a bunch of little guys taking on the big leagues. Even the bit characters stand out, I love the way this guy says his line and nods.
As for the main man himself, Will is a character with a welcome amount of complexity, both in the writing and in Ledger’s performance. Sure, he’s classically heroic, saving the weak and downtrodden, and he’s also a class hero to boot, with a big chip on his shoulder about the oppressive system he lives in and desires to escape from. But he also has his flaws – he’s got a short temper, and while he’s not dumb at all, he can be obtuse to the people around him in his single-minded devotion to his goals.
I got hella frustrated recently with The Last Airbender live action show for stripping the characters of all of their flaws, in favour of a story about perfect heroes taking on an unjust world, and this movie absolutely nails what I was looking for, showing that you can succeed in telling that kind of story with a more flawed protagonist.
It’s actually where the meat of the story lies – in Will’s pride. He’s correct in valuing himself more than those above him do, and his resoluteness is his greatest ally, but his unwillingness to change or compromise damages his relationships with others. In one notable scene, each of the characters in turn tell him to give up, to not put his life in danger for the sake of his own pride, and he refuses. It’s a tragically sweet highlight of the film.
Throughout the whole thing, there are so many moments of genuine tenderness. From a scene where the team co-write a love letter, each dropping the jokes for a moment to talk about a personal experience with love, after a bit about breasts of course, to the heart-wrenching scene where Will reunites with his father after 12 years away from home. The music and acting are all operating at the max here.
It should also be said, this is a sports movie, which is essentially an action movie with lower stakes, like if Rocky loses against Apollo, he isn’t immediately put to death, and losing doesn’t even matter in the end anyway, which is another question this movie gets from Rocky, huh – anyway, the action in this movie is fantastic.
It’s not like there’s a terrific amount of variety – after all, they’re jousting, they just ride at each other with sticks until one of them gets knocked off. There is a sword fighting montage though it’s not exactly stunning. But what they do with the jousting in the cinematography and editing is fantastic.
The anticipation and build up to each tilt is perfectly and dramatically paced, and they used the moments in between to have character moments, exposit, and build tension. Jousting naturally lends itself to that kind of pattern, building up to an explosive finish, then coming back around again for another go, with each round upping the stakes.
Each impact hits hard, with the sound design, the camerawork, and the reactions from the other characters making you reel back from each one, then quickly check for the result. Wrangling horses, going through dozens of balsa wood lances stuffed with linguine, yeah the splinters are linguine, must have been an absolute chore but it really pays off.
In general, there’s a lot of fun camerawork, and it’s never exactly the same during the jousts themselves. They often do the straight-on cross-cutting with the lances gradually pulling into focus because that makes sense, but they’ll also throw in little things like a camera that looks like it’s mounted on the lance, or a crash zoom or something; it’s a lot of fun.
I also appreciate that they could indicate speed and intensity without cutting the thing to death, and the use of extreme long takes in general throughout the movie, lord did the action movies of the 2010s make us appreciate this.
The rest of the production does feel somewhat sparse, like you never really get the sense that there’s much of a world outside of the sets. But to be honest, they’re in the European countryside in the 14th century, it’s not exactly a built-up world. And besides, I think it works in the film’s favour. It reminds me of the sets on one of those fantasy TV shows like Xena or Hercules, dyou know what I mean? All that natural outside lighting and stone that looks like it’s made of foam. This whole movie has the vibe of the credits from a 90s TV show, and it really works.
Now, as for the themes – yes, this movie has some pretty prominent themes – this is one where your mileage may vary, because A Knight’s Tale is primarily about class and gender. Now, there’s normally some kind of class element in these kinds of underdog stories, either in the text or the subtext, as the usually underfunded, scrappy underdog goes up against the elites of their field, but A Knight’s Tale states it more plainly than most, thanks in part to the significant power differential in 14th century England compared to people in our modern day.
Broadly, it’s all about beating the powerful at their own game, quite literally. Will’s entire pitch to the crew is that what he’s doing is exactly how the nobles got their power in the first place, he’s just a lot later to the scene. Characters like Adhemar and Edward are contrasted, with the former believing that peasants are inherently lesser people, and the latter recognising nobility as the sum of a person’s actions, not their inherited station.
On the gender side, it’s very late-90s/early-00s ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ which can feel a bit cringe in our times, but they execute the whole thing in a kind of shrugging, ‘eh, we’re just having fun’ way, such that I personally don’t mind it. Those aforementioned genuine moments go a long way to making it feel authentic rather than cynical.
It’s through Will and Jocelyn that both of these themes are explored the most in a very Titanic kind of way, you know rich girl and poor boy from different worlds. The ideas are interwoven surprisingly neatly, and it’s simultaneously the best and the worst thing about the film.
So, the good: Will is frequently irritated by the games she plays with him, calling her a spoiled rich girl who can afford to do things like this rather than make a beeline straight for what they want before it’s lost. He’s partly correct, but fails to recognise the lack of power Jocelyn has as a woman in their society, and that the last thing she wants is someone who won’t let her exert her own will, or see her as an extension of themselves.
One of Jocelyn’s main frustrations is that her station requires that she marry for political reasons rather than love, and in one scene, she says that she would accept being poor if it meant being with Will, and that he should give up on his ambitions. Will gets angry, telling her that she doesn’t know what she’s asking for, that she’s never had to struggle like he has, so her words don’t mean anything to him.
Mostly, the biggest initial barrier to their relationship is Will pretending to be something he’s not, copying the way nobles like Adhemar speak, rather than realising that it was his honesty and admiration for Jocelyn as her own person that she liked. I’ve been comparing this thing to Rocky the whole time, but honestly writing this thing made me realise this film is also basically Aladdin. Will, Jocelyn and Adhemar, along with their plots, are almost exact one-to-ones for Aladdin, Jasmine and Jafar.
But the bad, oh my god: Will is woefully dense, failing to take even the most blatant of hints, and ultimately crowdsourcing his romantic overtures from his friend group, despite the fact that the man clearly has the soul of a poet. It just comes across as lazy on his part, and forced on the writer’s part.
And Jocelyn? Jocelyn is insane. During the rocky part of their courtship, she demands that Will lose his next tournament to prove his love for her, after he messed up and started getting too egotistical and arsey. Not only would that affect his finances, like he has multiple dependents who need money to eat, but jousting is also fairly dangerous. Every hit that he takes could tragically kill him if he gets hit at the wrong angle. But she’s like, nope, abandon your career and risk your life repeatedly, and I might be your girlfriend.
This is where the whole outdated romance plot thing will start being an issue for some, and like I said, it doesn’t really bother me in the experience of watching the movie, mainly because this is all mostly resolved – the characters grow and learn to get along by the end. But I know there are people who’ll be annoyed by this. I could talk about it a lot longer, but this isn’t an in-depth analysis, so let’s move on.
The most notable feature of the film, and likely the one that everyone finds so memorable, is the huge anachronisms. Now, it’s not a particularly rare thing to have a story set in medieval England where characters are speaking vaguely modern English as opposed to a more period appropriate dialect. But there’s a big difference between that, and having a crowd of peasants sing We Will Rock You. There’s a big difference between bodging some of the rules of contemporary society, and mans putting on a suit of Nike plate armour.
I couldn’t believe it when I found out, but some people don’t like this stuff. Jocelyn’s whole deal is probably a big anachronism that throws people off, I’m sure. Everyone else in the movie is British or French, or putting on a pretty solid English accent, but she’s got a straight-up American accent the whole time and no one comments on it. Not only that, but she shows up with hair dyed a different colour in practically every scene, or a spiky punk hairstyle, and I can see people getting vexed purely over the existence of Manic Pixie Dream Girl aesthetics here.
It mainly boils down to how the medieval setting is fairly consistent throughout, but then suddenly you’re hearing AC/DC and it’s jarring. It seems similar to how done people are these days with movie musicals that aren’t animated.
Conversely, I’ve always loved musicals, and this movie’s musical choices, so I’m thinking that they’re expressions of the same feeling. Honestly, this soundtrack slaps so hard, with Queen bookending the movie, and other classic rock popping up repeatedly throughout. Much in the same way that things like Hallelujah are Shrek songs despite existing for decades before Shrek, Golden Years, Low Rider and The Boys Are Back In Town are all Knight’s Tale songs for me.
It could also be a cultural thing – like I’ve said before, the combination of underdog story, lads on tour, classic rock, and sticking it to some posh twat is basically tailor-made to appeal to a British audience, but I don’t know how much of that speaks to an American.
By the way, the DVD commentary track for this film is dynamite, Brian Helgeland and Paul Bettany have this running joke where they keep pretending that they had no idea that stadium rock music didn’t exist in the 14th century.
The only other film I can think of that plays with this level of anachronism is the 2018 Robin Hood starring Taron Egerton. The film was nicknamed Zero Dark Loxley by Dan Olsen in a vlog, which is both fantastic, and extremely apt, because the film is drawing upon a number of modern aesthetics.
One being the use of 21st century military tactics, which earned it the Zero Dark Loxley nickname, but it’s rampant – there’s cops wielding riot shields and everyone’s wearing semi-modern clothing, like nothing anyone would actually wear in the real world, but something you might see a character in an Assassin’s Creed game wearing.
People roundly hated that one too, and that also perplexes me. Aren’t we here to engage in creativity and imagination? Isn’t fun the primary goal? Parallels between the Crusades and the Iraq War are so appropriate it hurts, and taking it a step further with a bleed of aesthetics provides a unique visual element to enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, that movie is a piece of crap, but the deliberately anachronistic concept has legs. Are people so down bad for hyperrealism that any deviation from existence, or at least the accepted depiction of existence that we have on film, is to be rejected?
Or for a much better example with a lighter, but still significant anachronistic bent, take Pirates of the Caribbean. In complete contrast to the Errol Flynn-type that was originally planned for the role, Johnny Depp and Jerry Bruckheimer’s take on Jack Sparrow was that pirates are like the rockstars of their time, so if Jack is a washed-up pirate, he should play him like a rockstar past his prime. Hence all the Keith Richards-ness. He feels completely out of place amongst the more stereotypical pirates and all the 18th century frippery, and that’s part of the fun.
All of the features of modern sports brought back in time in A Knight’s Tale are equally fitting. If jousting is a violent contact sport with a focus on crowd-pleasing entertainment, then the motifs of boxing, wrestling and football would make just as much sense there as they do here. It’s an expression of seeing things as the same not for their visual aesthetics, but for their function, for what they mean to people.
I can certainly see why people would be wary about introducing historical inaccuracy to the film industry. Every single time they release one of those musician biopics, we do the rounds of ‘wow they really sanitised the murkier aspects of their life, and mythologised the life of an otherwise ordinary person’. It carries potential risks of diminishing or outright burying information on a person’s life, preventing us from adequately confronting the realities of the past, and creating a hero culture around our celebrities that creates unrealistic expectations of present and future public figures, followed by harsh social punishments when they inevitably have human flaws.
But A Knight’s Tale is operating on a completely different level. The anachronisms are so blatant, and the creators are so clear with their intentions upfront, that clearly no one was expected to take much of the material seriously. This is a film that exists so far out of reality, that any resemblance to our own history is purely coincidental. But if you can accept A Knight’s Tale’s strangeness, you’re more than rewarded for doing so. It’s a hilarious, action-packed, genuinely sweet, and an all-round good time.
In many of my other Movies That Deserve More Love videos, I’ve praised films for their imagination, and how they inspired further imagination in me. If Tim Burton got to make an extremely Burtonesque Batman movie, what could, say, an unrestrained Wes Anderson do with Transformers for instance?
Likewise, A Knight’s Tale makes me wonder what else could be possible in the same framework. We’ve got medieval Rocky – what else can we do? Tudor James Bond, about an Elizabethan spy? Reformation-era Saw featuring a Puritan serial killer? Comanche Fast and Furious in colonial America? I mean come on.
A Knight’s Tale feels like a movie dreamed up from this same kind of innocent blue-sky thinking, and that’s something I think is extremely valuable, especially in the relatively safe and conservative franchise-dominated movie scene we have today. Check it out if you get the chance, or I will fong you.
Let me know in the comments how you found it, or what you think if you’d seen it already. I find it so heartwarming seeing that I’m not alone in thinking these things are the tits. And if you’ve been around a while and enjoy the videos, consider supporting us on Patreon. You’ll get shoutouts, early videos, bonus videos, things like cut content from existing ones – all that good stuff. Plus if I make a video that gets blocked, which as I’m sure you’re aware, happens a lot here, it’ll be on Patreon. There’s a link in the description.
Thanks for watching, my name’s Drew, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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