The King (2019)

The King arrives with the full apparatus of prestige: Timothée Chalamet's cheekbones, Nicholas Britell's sombre score, and a running time that dares you to check your phone. David Michôd and Joel Edgerton have taken three of Shakespeare's history plays and stripped them of verse, leaving a grim procedural about a reluctant monarch who would rather drink in Eastcheap than inherit a kingdom. It is a handsome film. It is also a film convinced that mud and candlelight constitute profundity.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is blank. The cast is uniformly white, which is what happens when you adapt the Henriad without asking questions of it. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no critique of patriarchy, no engagement with race or climate or the extraction of labor. Catherine of Valois gets one sharp scene in which she questions her husband's reasons for war, and then the credits roll. The film is interested in power, betrayal, and the loneliness of the crown, which are old concerns and not modern ones. Nothing here is arranged to instruct the viewer in how to live.

Historians have complained about the terrain at Agincourt and the timing of a royal marriage, but these are errors of fact, not of ideology. The King does not reinterpret the fifteenth century through a 2020s lens. It simply gets the fifteenth century wrong in the ordinary way that movies always have. There is no sermon here, no lesson delivered to the audience about how to behave. A king kills the man who deceived him and orders prisoners executed in the mud. The film watches. That is all it does, and it does it with a straight face.