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Early on in Netflix’s The King, Joel Edgerton’s Falstaff makes his first appearance onscreen. But although he has a wine bottle in his hand, he’s not there to drink or flirt or dance or do any of the things that Shakespeare’s much-celebrated Falstaff does. This Falstaff has a wound in his side, and he needs it cauterized by his protégé, Timothée Chalamet’s dour, smirking Prince Hal.
We get a closeup of the red hot blade of Hal’s sword as he lowers it across Falstaff’s bleeding back, and then the flesh sizzles, Falstaff shrieks, and you can imagine a slogan flashing across the screen, ’70s movie trailer style: “This ain’t your daddy’s Shakespeare.”
Falstaff aside, it’s not really Shakespeare at all. Directed and co-written by David Michôd, with Edgerton co-writing and producing, The King is ostensibly an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henriad, which is the name given to the three plays Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. (It also sometimes includes Richard II, the play that precedes them.) But apart from the fact that The King is largely about the same historical events that the Henriad covers — the transformation of callow party boy Prince Hal into the war hero King Henry V — The King has very little to do with its theoretical source material.
Mostly, The King is about the corrupting influences of power, and the idea that war, perhaps especially Renaissance war, is an inhuman, brutal experience.
And it is damned if it’s going to let you get off your couch with any ideas to the contrary. No, The King will thump its themes into your head, whatever it goddamned takes.
The King does an admirable job of illustrating that war is hell. Then the film does it again, a few more times, just in case.
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Prince Hal is traditionally thought of as a frat boy running wild, but in the universe of The King, Hal’s decision to abandon his responsibilities as heir to his father’s throne to go carousing through London’s underbelly at Falstaff’s side has nothing to do with pleasure or hedonism. When we get an extended closeup of a drunken Hal dancing in drag, there’s no joy anywhere in the frame: Chalamet molds his face into a skull with a rictus grin, wine staining his teeth and the hair from a mopey scarecrow wig straggling into his eyes.
Hal’s rumspringa here is a principled objection. He does not care for the civil wars in which his father Henry IV is enmeshed, and he is determined to avoid them at all costs. Naively, he believes that he can live in the world and still keep his hands clean of violence.
But after the death of his father, Hal finds himself forced to reckon with his own pacifism. Before you can say “haircut,” he’s sitting on a throne, wearing red ermine and a new pageboy ‘do, and in the face of what his advisers tell him is unforgivable provocation from the French, announcing his decision to invade France.
And boy does he. Hal’s invasion of France takes up the bulk of this movie, and it is pointedly grim and dour. There’s a long, interminable siege, followed by a long, interminable march through the French countryside, followed by a long, interminable discussion of military tactics. When the big set-piece battle finally comes — the Battle of Agincourt, the most celebrated of the English victories against the French during the Hundred Years’ War — there’s no relief.
In some ways, that’s a good thing. The King is one of the few movies I’ve ever seen that answers the old saw of whether it’s possible to make war look truly unattractive on camera with a resounding “yes”: This war is all anonymous armored figures hurling themselves at each other like football players to bash about with swords or beat each other to death or drown each other in the soupy, smothering mud all around them. When Michôd’s camera travels up and up and up to provide an aerial shot of the battle, all we see is a heaving, horrifying press of flesh and metal and dirt. There is nothing heroic or impressive about it.
The Battle of Agincourt scene is also where Chalamet is at his best. He plays Hal with an understated earnestness that leaves him looking even younger and more vulnerable than usual in the first act of the movie, but there’s a tenacious ferocity lurking under his skin that only becomes fully visible as the battle starts and he flings himself into the mud. It’s a classic boy-to-man arc, and while Chalamet must surely soon get sick of playing boys who suffer beautifully and then become men (as he did in 2017’s Call Me By Your Name and 2018’s Beautiful Boy), he commits himself to the role with admirable zeal.
But in other ways, The King is a fucking slog of a movie. It is filled with macho posturing about war and kingship and the nature of power and how really, it’s extremely virtuous to be extremely boring, and there is hardly any sense of humor to be found onscreen at all.
This movie badly needs some lightness, and the only person who seems willing to provide it is Robert Pattinson, who pops in for a few scenes as the French Dauphin, a louche fop with a weakness for gold silk and an accent that’s directly descended from Pépé Le Pew. Pattinson is the only one with the guts to go full camp here, in other words, and I for one can only thank him profoundly for his efforts and hope that he brings the same spirit to his forthcoming Batman.
It’s odd, though, that The King needs a sense of humor so badly, because that element was never missing from the Henriad. That’s why Falstaff was there: to be comic and lovable and destined for tragedy, to provide the plays with their beating heart — and then to rip the audience’s still-beating hearts from their chests when the newly crowned Hal, committed to the responsibility and power of kingship, renounces Falstaff and his joyous mayhem at the end of Henry IV Part 2. “I know thee not, old man,” Hal says, and never once have I heard an audience fail to gasp in audible grief in response. Heck, I always gasp, even though I also always root for Hal to break himself away from Falstaff. (I am too Type A to fully appreciate id-driven characters, and I accept this.)
The King’s Falstaff can’t quite fulfill that function, because he exists to be Hal’s conscience, and to remind him that war should only ever be fought out of absolute necessity. He’s a monklike and macho character, a conscientious objector who is also a brilliant military tactician, and while there is nothing wrong with putting that kind of figure into a war movie, at a certain point you do have to wonder why Edgerton and company bothered naming him Falstaff at all. It’s not as though Falstaff was a real life historical figure who played a vital role in King Henry V’s reign and they needed him to tell the story, after all. He had a few minor historical analogs, but he was pretty much just Shakespeare’s original creation.
The King’s rewriting of Falstaff ends up feeling bizarrely pointed, especially when it comes to the difference between the ultimate fate of the two characters. In the Henriad, Falstaff dies offstage between Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, and when we learn that he drank himself to death, it’s in a heartbreakingly understated moment. But in The King, Falstaff heroically commits himself to the front lines of the Battle of Agincourt, even knowing that he’ll be going to his certain demise.
“We both know it’s what I was built for,” he tells Hal. “It’s either this or drink myself to death in Eastcheap” — as Shakespeare’s Falstaff did — “and I think this makes for a better story.”
Does it, though? Or is it simply characteristic of the kinds of changes that The King has made to the Henriad: stripping away all the joy and the humor and the pleasure and the subtlety from the story, and pounding away at what’s left with a dull, dull sledgehammer?
The King will be released in theaters October 11 before streaming on Netflix November 1.
