A Knight's Tale borrows it's title and underlying morale (about chivalry and honour and stuff) from one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It wins a thunderous but disappointingly blunted 6 and a half tournament lances from 10.
Set around a fourteenth century peasant trying to make his way through the knightly jousting ranks, this isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema. Director Brian Helgeland makes sure, though, that we're not bored. What's lacking in tension or depth, it seems, he elected to make up for in colour and charm. There's a terrible tendancy to shoot anything set before 1960 in shades of brown and grey, but A Knight's Tale delivers us riotous stadium scenes ablaze with heraldry and trappings. Each scene is optimistically colourful - every day is a glorious cloudless summer , unless we need atmospheric rain. In which case, it's driving rain with stoic torchlight fluttering in the windows. Bugger realism, it looks great. The score follows similar anachronistic lines (I particularly enjoyed Bowie's Golden Years and The Boys Are Back in Town) as well as the wardrobe.
I wrote only two notes whilst watching this film. Having covered the first (modernity) I alight directly to the second.
Resplendant in a black-trimmed leather trenchcoat, Paul Bettany's Geoffrey Chaucer is magnificent. He first swaggers onto the screen naked as a babe; not many can pull off a swagger without clothes (Try it some time. It's hard. You feel self conscious.) but Bettany plays the writer with such a casual charm one almost doesn't realise that he's stealing almost every scene of the film. Chaucer is written as Heath Ledger's herald... a silken tounged announcer rolling out glorious lyrical hyperbolic introductions. The fact that Bettany is obviously having tremendous fun playing the part makes watching his wit almost as entertaining as delivering it. He's able, along with the rest of Will(that's the Knight about whom the Tale is written)'s entourage, to play off the earnest lead played well, if without frills, by Heath Ledger.
A Knight's Tale is a strikingly average film. The good performances (Mark Addy's squire) are offset by some alarmingly bland ones (the Love Interest). Good writing in the comic scenes is undone by faltering dialogue in the romance subplot. The film would have been better for the removal of that section entirely, in hindsight. The joust scenes are well executed but there's a fundamental problem in that one joust is much the same as any other. In short, it was heading squarely for a 5 out of 10 until a fine young actor by name of Bettany stepped into the shoes of a 14th century poet. Bettany is the difference between this film and a thousand other cinema-by-numbers fairytales.
