The earliest surviving narrative text featuring that rogue we now know as the Prince of Thieves, the Fox of Sherwood, the guy with the bow, is the ballad of “Robin Hood and the Monk.” Our copy is believed to date back to around 1450, although the tale is likely older. But even that long ago, many of the elements we associate with Robin Hood are already in place: the Merry Men, Little John, and an antipathy toward the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Yet if you actually go back to dust off the stanzas and verse of that tale, the details can be disquietingly unique. Robin robs from the rich, yes—or at least the clergy of the title—but it’s not at all clear if this is for his own pocket or anyone else’s. Also when the monk of its title gets Robin Hood arrested, Little John and the Merry Men respond by executing the friar and his page both, beheading them like a farmer culls wheat. It offers an altogether bleaker vision of the Middle Ages; and likely a more honest one too since England really hadn’t left that era by the 15th century.
It’s also a world that the writer-director of Pig, Michael Sarnoski, seeks to capture with unrelenting verisimilitude in his new A24 picture, The Death of Robin Hood. Given its title and Hugh Jackman’s severe gray beard in the marketing, the extreme violence likely will not surprise many. The film’s quiet and even stunning sense of grace, however, could be an outright revelation for those willing to endure the early medieval hack-and-slash carnage.
Pulling loosely from several 16th century ballads about Robin Hood’s death at the hands of a wicked prioress, Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood in many ways resembles the simple, yet often moving, adult dramas of the 1970s (albeit not, ironically, that decade’s own death of Robin Hood movie starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn). It is a straightforward character study told in two parts. The first is about the reality behind the myth of Jackman’s Robin Hood; the second accounts for the absolution of this monster at the hands of a genuine hero: Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer) and her priory on the Irish Sea.
This parable kicks off properly when an old and grizzled Robin is found living alone in the wilderness by his former compatriot, the much younger Little John (Bill Skarsgård). Whether any other Merry Men existed is ambiguous, but based on the fact that John still wears green while Robin is bundled up in blacks, grays, and the red of those he’s killed, it’s clear which of them actually believes the legends that have already begun to spring up along the countryside like dandelions. John romanticizes his past, even as he finds some semblance of peace for the future with a wife and young daughter, Margaret (Faith Delaney). Alas, the past isn’t done with him. Relatives of a nobleman he slew some years back have taken his family hostage, and John wants Robin to go on one last adventure to free them.
The aftermath of that quest is so cataclysmically violent that our wounded folk hero is forced to seek shelter in the aforementioned priory on the sea. There, Comer’s Prioress has built a bucolic Eden separate from the medieval miseries across the waterway. She takes in orphans, loners, and even a leper (an endearingly aloof Murray Bartlett). And now she has taken in Robin, albeit the leper warns the brigand not to reveal his famous identity to the others. So things grow complicated when John’s little girl Margaret also arrives on the island, recognizing Robin as her father’s friend. Meanwhile others likewise approach, searching for the outlaw.
Seeing Hugh Jackman play another legendary hero at sunset after the also quite poignant Logan nearly a decade ago might cause some viewers to suspect this is familiar territory for the Australian star. Yet the tagline “he was no hero” proves to be more than just a marketing gimmick. It is difficult to think of a recent protagonist more challenging or potentially despicable than this Robin Hood. It is, indeed, the first movie I can think of with a scene where the protagonist of your film considers whether they may, or may not, murder a child—depending on if Margaret knows him by the name Robin. Frequent Sarnoski cinematographer Pat Scola even shoots the queasy scene by torchlight, casting ominous red pits in Jackman’s eyes.
There will be some viewers who will simply recoil at the prospect of such a depiction of a classic hero—and others who don’t want to see any feature with a hero (in the loosest sense) who is so broken and flawed. But for those up for the challenge, the emotional resonance of the piece unfurls a profound beauty that’s survived in the most perilous of contexts. It’s like a flower that’s somehow bloomed in the grays of January.
Part of this is obviously Jackman’s undeniable charisma as a performer. A born showman with a penchant for soulfulness, he exudes a humane intelligence hiding behind a beast’s fixed grimace. I do not think this Robin can be redeemed, but he can atone, which is where the real heart of the film comes into focus.
A deeply thoughtful and often understated performer, Jodie Comer’s Sister Brigid proves the true core of the film. Despite Robin not living up to the legends that strangers spin about him, Jackman’s character is in many ways an open book. The Prioress, on the other hand, is warm and empathetic, patient and forgiving. Nonetheless, Comer imbues the woman with just enough mystery to hint at layers and motivations left unseen, and perhaps a journey far grander than even Robin Hood’s. His is a world of gray, hers is awash in natural light, offering the only green in the movie not worn by Little John. Hers is the actual story of redemption for a land, if not a man.
The obvious inversion of the legend, where Robin is the fiend and the Prioress the hero, amounts to a classic kind of revisionism that used to be commonplace in Hollywood. Nowadays, though, it’s faintly heretical to find a film so willing to dwell in deep shadows and wallow in the mess of the human experience instead of sanitizing it. The fact Sarnoski does this with what is essentially intellectual property via Robin Hood is shrewd. By adapting one of the most famous characters in the English language, Sarnoski creates a mythic stage to put on a show every bit as big-hearted, and curiously innocent of guile, as Pig was four years ago.
That it achieves this after the first half hour borders on medieval snuff cinema—with Robin and Little John rolling in the mud of their soon to be murdered attackers—is a kind of tonal magic trick. It also is a credit to the dignity of all the performances.
Together they and their director, perhaps aptly in the 21st century, reject one of the great cinema quotes from a previous one. “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The Death of Robin Hood would seem to argue when fact is concealed by legend, tear down the myth before it deludes and poisons the soul. The Death of Robin Hood guards its own soul jealously before finally expressing it with deep equanimity and fellowship.
The Death of Robin Hood opens on Friday, June 19.
