It is essentially a sports movie in fancy dress. In the Middle Ages, we are informed early on, “a new sport arose”, and that sport was jousting. Hardly a sport in the modern sense, but then part of the stock in trade of A Knight’s Tale is its deliberate, casual anachronism. This is not just a matter of tone, in the way a film such as Plunkett and Macleane, about two 18th-century highwaymen, displayed a range of distinctly 20th-century attitudes. Nor is it, unfortunately, though one suspects it would like to be, a real reinvention of the kind of rambunctious take on history that Richard Lester so memorably pioneered in his Musketeers movies — or, for that matter, Lester’s darker view of a legendary past irradiated by a peculiarly modern cynicism, as in his masterpiece Robin and Marian.
No, the way A Knight’s Tale makes hay from the time-out-of-joint method is lighter, more easily humorous; the filmmakers are determined that a good time shall be had by all, and if that means sticking to a repetitive plot and the recursion of basically the same joke, so be it. Its style is signalled blatantly right at the start, when we have a mediaeval audience waiting
for a jousting match to begin: they are clapping, stomping and singing Queen’s We Will Rock You just like a crowd at a present-day football match. This is amusing, and sets the tone for the flick as a whole. (It is bookended by Queen songs, both sporting favourites — the other, naturally, is We Are the Champions.)
William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) is a peasant with even greater social mobility than his prime-ministerial namesake. But then he is very well-spoken for a peasant; she had to have diction lessons. When the knight he is serving dies on the eve of a tournament, he enterprisingly straps on the dead man’s armour and enters the lists (as they used to say in those days) in his place — very successfully. So successfully that he is able to embark on a career in pseudo-knighthood, doing the rounds of well-paid continental tournaments.
He is aided in this business by his late master’s servants Roland (Mark Addy) and Wat (Alan Tudyk), who form an engagingly comic duo. Soon another unlikely helpmeet comes to William’s aid — Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany). “Chaucer’s the name, writing’s the game,” he says with tacky nonchalance; he is able to provide the fake documentation required for Willam to remake himself as “Sir Ulric of Lichtenstein”.
Chaucer is also in place to act as Sir Ulric’s praise-singer before each joust, rather in the way today’s wrestlers are given hyperbolic introductions. The presence of Chaucer as a character, played by Bettany with neat wit, adds spice as well as some extra fun for those who actually recall The Canterbury Tales, though this narrative bears little resemblance to the chivalrous romance of Chaucer’s own Knight’s Tale.
As the tournaments roll on, William’s team is joined by a woman armourer (Laura Fraser), who is at the cutting edge of technological advancement in this sport — and the business of branding. William develops a rivalry, both amorous and sporting, with one Count Adhemar (a suave Rufus Sewell), which is necessary for a bit of dramatic tension. Moreover, his life is complicated somewhat by his passion for a high-born lady, Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon), whose hairdos are a whole genre of anachonism on their own — they come straight from the annals of Eighties pop.
Her presence doesn’t complicate William’s life enough, though, for my taste. Historical accuracy having been ignored by the movie so far, there is no need for it to limit itself to the chaste constraints of courtly love, no reason we couldn’t have been provided with a little more Chaucerian bawdy. After all, William is played by the luscious Ledger, who could clearly have any bedmate he chose, and here are two comely damsels within his grasp. Why wait so long for one measly smooch?
And if we’re going to have a temporary breach with Jocelyn, apparently just for the hell of it, why not make the armourer Kate (who is more interesting, anyway) the cause of it? This seems like at least a couple of opportunities lost.
Thinking back on the movie, one keeps finding more lost opportunities, or just flaws — such as the hurried, ham-handed plotting of the final stretch, or the lack of visual variation in the jousting bouts. This movie is basically pitched at undemanding 12-year-olds.
But that is, in part, the vision of retrospect. It may be valid criticism, and A Knight’s Tale is certainly not a great movie, or even perhaps a particularly good one, but for the hour and a half that it rollicked past my eyes on screen I — who detest most sports, ancient and modern — was thoroughly entertained. I could even abide those hoary old Queen tunes for the nonce.