The King
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Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V in Netflix’s The King
At the beginning of the month, Netflix released The King, their second action drama—after Outlaw King—based on the reign of a medieval British king to be released in November. I hope this becomes an annual event. I also hope the movies get better.
The King, directed by David Michôd and written by Michôd and actor Joel Edgerton, tells the story of England’s King Henry V. All retellings of Henry’s reign move in the shadow of Shakespeare’s play, so there are a couple of ways a new film about him can go. One is simply to adapt the play, which has been done plenty of times before—by Sir Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and most recently as an episode of The Hollow Crown. I had hoped The King would go the other route and give us a straight historical film about Henry. Michôd and Edgerton split the difference—the film is not precisely historical but more a reimagining or updating of Shakespeare. It doesn’t quite work.
A kingdom for a stage
The film begins with material from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, in which the Percys—erstwhile supporters of Henry IV in his seizure of power from his cousin Richard II—rebel against the king. (Here’s more about that, courtesy of Netflix.) Henry or Hal (Timothée Chalamet), the wastrel Prince of Wales, learns that his younger brother Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman) has been given command of his father’s army. He leaves his slumming and wenching in a snit, rides to the battle, seizes control of the army from Thomas, and defeats the rebels by killing their leader, Harry “Hotspur” Percy (Tom Glynn-Carney), in single combat. Hotspur’s death ends the rebellion and Henry’s risking of his own life spares those of the soldiers on both sides.
The film sets up a number of rivalries in this opening act—Henry IV vs Hotspur, Hal vs his younger brother Thomas, Hal vs his ailing and distrustful father. But shortly thereafter the king (Ben Mendelsohn) dies and the prince, now King Henry V, ascends the throne. Thus one more rivalry ends. Then Henry receives word that his brother has died subduing rebels elsewhere in the kingdom. There goes another.
So by the time we reach the thirty-minute mark, Henry rules in reasonable and uncontested comfort and has already begun carrying himself like a king. Already the narrative begins to sag, and Falstaff (co-writer Joel Edgerton) occasionally appears to give the film the appearance of some kind of throughline, but has little to do but mutter and banter with his landlady.
The bulk of the movie, beginning with the tennis ball incident, is spent on Henry’s first campaign in northern France, renewing the English claim to the French throne that had begun the Hundred Years’ War under Edward III. Henry is presented as motivated by retribution—first for slights to his person by the French, then because of an assassination attempt that is foiled by his adviser William Gascoigne (Sean Harris), and a French-sponsored conspiracy to remove him from the throne. From this point the film follows the historical record and Shakespeare reasonably closely, first with the siege of Harfleur and then the Battle of Agincourt. Neither is presented particularly accurately, but they are dramatic and visually stunning, and Henry emerges bloodied and muddied but victorious.
Even if the film was a bit dramatically inert, I enjoyed it up to this point and especially liked the scene the screenwriters give to Henry and his ultimate rival, Charles VI, King of France (Thibault de Montalembert), in which Charles tenderly reflects on the sources of their conflict and the role of family. But then we reach the final scenes of the film. Henry meets his betrothed, Charles’s daughter Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp), and she gives him a woke show of force, refusing to submit to her new husband—“You must earn my respect”—and throwing shade at the entire structure of medieval life: “All monarchy is illegitimate.” Okay then.
Regardless, Catherine rattles Henry enough that he seeks a private audience with his adviser William Gascoigne, who has skulked in the background through much of the movie without really being fleshed out. William reveals that he was behind the assassination attempt and he helped construct the attempted coup in order to give Henry an enemy to prove himself against. It’s Henry’s court as the Bush White House, complete with Cheney. The Hundred Years’ War was an inside job.
Henry then kills William in a fit of rage, just to seal the stupid in for added flavor.
Princes to act
Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin in The King
It’s probably clear what I disliked about the movie, but I did like a great deal of it. It is technically brilliant, with beautifully lit and composed cinematography that, especially in the cool, moody interiors of the opening act, evokes the great Roger Deakins. The cinematographer and editor, Adam Arkapaw and Peter Sciberras respectively, also resist overreliance on handheld (so-called “shaky cam”) and fast cuts and give us battle scenes that are both impressionistic and comprehensible, which was refreshing. Everything from the cinematography to the costuming to the droning string score is austere and moody to a fault. It’s heightened and operatic and I really liked the look and feel of it.
The film’s greatest strength—and weakness, as I’ll discuss below—is its performances. The supporting players are all excellent. Ben Mendelsohn, everyone’s favorite lip-smacking baddie, stands out in a short appearance as Henry IV and Tom Glynn-Carney, who played Mark Rylance’s son in Dunkirk, was so good as Hotspur that I wish he’d had more screentime. I’ve already mentioned Thibault de Montalembert as the King of France, who makes a strong impression as a fragile and weary monarch in his one scene, and Sean Harris as Gascoigne. Harris, who was great in the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies and as Macduff in the 2015 Macbeth, is very good in a severely underwritten part, using a stoop and a serpent-like hissing voice to suggest wisdom and insight as he steps up to mentor the young king. The twist with his character at the end would have worked well if Harris had had more to work with, if it had been more carefully set up from the beginning, and if it weren’t so stupid. Harris acquits himself admirably, though, and until that final scene I enjoyed him every moment he was onscreen.
But the standout member of the cast, to my surprise, was Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin. Despite his misuse in the Twilight films, Pattinson has talent and indulges in his part, speaking in a mincing Inspector Clouseau accent that suggests he is mocking Henry every time they interact. He also, as the internet was quick to appreciate, gets in some sick burns before dying at Agincourt. He steals every scene he’s in.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with The King is the king himself. Timothée Chalamet, alumnus of Oscar-bait films Call Me By Your Name and Beautiful Boy, plays Prince Hal as an emo kid, slouching around in black clothes and a stringy haircut and hating on his stupid dad. I’ve had this kid in the back row of many classrooms over the years. If you’ve ever tired of Shakespeare’s “warlike Harry” and wanted something more punchable, your ship has come in. Chalamet shows more life and intensity at the beginning of the second act, after he has assumed the throne and has steeled himself to take charge of the kingdom. But this energy flags and by the time his army has reached Harfleur he is mooning around his tent soliciting advice from Falstaff. If Pattinson and the others consistently steal the scene, it’s because Chalamet lets them.
Piece out our imperfections
Posthumous portrait of Henry V
Before I say anything about The King’s “accuracy”—which I’ve already been asked about—a quick note about that. Accuracy per se does not make or break a movie. I love and adore Braveheart, perhaps the worst historical film ever made, precisely because it is a good story, well told. (For more on all those points, see here.) So even as I realized the film was going to be more fiction than historical, I was still ready to enjoy it.
As I said above, The King reimagines or repurposes Shakespeare, following the Bard more often than the historical record but frequently departing from both. Its borrowings from Shakespeare include Hal’s wastrel youth—for which we have no contemporary evidence but which had become a staple of folklore by the Tudor era—his friendship with the fictional Falstaff, his triumph over Hotspur in single combat at the Battle of Shrewsbury, the French sponsorship of the Southhampton plot (which was really a move by English nobles to place a cousin of Henry on the throne), the presence of the Dauphin at Agincourt, and quite a lot more.
Its departures from Shakespeare include killing off Henry’s brother Thomas before the invasion of France and killing the Dauphin during the Battle of Agincourt, giving Falstaff a longer life and an active role in the leadership and fighting in France, as well as a battlefield death—the meaning or purpose of which eludes me—and, especially, having the plots against Henry turn out to be the work of a devious underling.
The real Henry V did lead his father’s army—at age sixteen—against the Percys at Shrewsbury, but there was no single combat. Henry was, in fact, shot in the face by a crossbow and his surgeon saved his life with a remarkable piece of medieval surgery. (A small scar on one cheekbone appears to be the filmmakers’ concession to this real-life event, but nothing is made of it and Henry emerges from Shrewsbury unscathed.) The timeline is compressed quite a bit, moving from Shrewsbury in 1403 to Henry’s accession in 1413 without so much as a speedbump. The real Thomas lived almost as long as his brother and was present throughout the campaign in northern France. The dauphin was not present—much less killed—at Agincourt, but did die shortly afterward in an unrelated incident.
I could go on, but that would become tedious—and that’s not even getting into nitpicking the reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt or other issues of authenticity. (Here’s one pet peeve: longbowmen shooting coordinated unaimed volleys high into the air rather than aiming.) That’s not what this movie is about. What’s here is fine, nicely realized and beautifully shot and orchestrated, but in the end it’s not enough.
Unworthy scaffold
When I had finished the film I was left wondering who The King is for. It is not and apparently was never intended to be a historical film, and its loose grasp on the real events and its otherwise forgiveable interest in atmosphere over authenticity work continuously against that kind of enjoyment. But The King doesn’t really work as an adaptation of Shakespeare either. In altering the plays it loses the Bard’s grasp on character and plot and, perhaps most grievously, his magnificent poetry. Whatever Michôd and Edgerton can come up with for the speech before Agincourt could never eclipse the words of Shakespeare’s Henry, and it doesn’t.
The King, like the title character himself, is handsomely mounted but lifeless, which is a shame considering the legendary stuff the filmmakers had to work with.
