Richard Armitage and the durability of Guy of Gisborne

Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood 1.7. This was the cap that did it to me. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Having had occasion recently to look back at the beginnings of this blog, it struck me that while Mr. Thornton gave me Armitagemania, and Lucas North was my second Armitage love, Guy of Gisborne tipped me over the threshold of silence into blogging about Richard Armitage. After I’d seen series 7 of Spooks, I got temporarily hungup on the fact that the series 8 DVDs were not yet available (eventually I watched an illegal upload on youtube, and then I ended up buying a region-free player and the DVDs anyhow), but I was looking for more, and that was why I got Netflix — so I could stream Robin Hood. And after seeing Guy that I realized there would be no way out, anytime soon, and what I was feeling would have to come to words. Some of this was this look (I must have been in that target demographic, occasionally described as “mums,” even if I don’t have kids), but there were other fundamental issues. I just rediscovered that I was writing about status conflicts even then, though I was talking about them as a matter of narrative as opposed to acting style.

During FanstRAvaganza 3, I speculated that Guy of Gisborne would be one of Richard Armitage’s most durable characters. Admittedly, in Armitage’s last posted showreel, Guy does not figure in any of the long scenes (as opposed to the scene from Sparkhouse that I discussed here and two other scenes I’ll be moving to eventually). In the montage, Guy’s role seems to be mostly to demonstrate Armitage’s capacity for action; extreme, even brutal emotion; and danger. That decision makes sense to me; interest in strong and complex dramatic roles precludes the inclusion of long excerpts from Robin Hood, which is too likely to be written off by any casual viewer as kid tv, even thought it was often more than that and in my opinion Armitage’s skill as an actor had developed by several steps in the interval between the roles. But when asked in a BBCA interview that preceded the broadcast of series 2 of the show which scene he’d enjoyed most filming, after some thought Armitage mentioned the sequence between Guy and Marian over the necklace (Robin Hood 1.7), which he described as “a mini-play.”

So I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at these scenes. Not least because “it was like a play” is a term of praise for a scene that Armitage has used at least one other time as in referring to the proposal scene in North & South as one of his favorites in the interview on the DVD. The reference reads like a signal that he particularly liked something or thought the work worthy of his creative energy.

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In this episode, Allan (Joe Armstrong) is drawn into conflict with the gang over the criminal activities of his brother, but the part of the episode that interests me is the sequence Armitage mentions in the interview above, the conflict between Sir Guy of Gisborne and Marian over the necklace, which culminates in an inescapable conclusion for Gisborne — Marian must be betraying him and causing the constant failure of his plans at the hands of Robin et al. What we think he must know, at least unconsciously, in episode 1.5, about Marian’s duplicity, Guy must confront head-on in this episode, and that confrontation shows his character from a number of frightening sides.

When a young woman and her fiancé ask Guy for permission to marry, Guy takes her necklace as an exchange for the favor. He gives it to Marian; Marian gives it to Robin; Robin gives it back to the young woman; Guy sees it on the her neck; Guy takes it again, but gives it away out of a feeling of being spurned and betrayed. The Sheriff is convinced that the traitor must be inside the castle, which causes Gisborne to suspect his right-hand man, who is tortured. The man’s unnecessary death must make Gisborne’s awareness that Marian has betrayed him even more galling.

In the end, the Sheriff hangs Tom and his accomplices. Robin learns what Gisborne knows about the necklace and exerts himself to get his hands on it again to give it back to Marian to withdraw her from suspicion as the traitor. The scenes in question open with Guy seated across from Sir Edward at Knighton manor house, waiting for her to return and explain herself. They end with Marian, who’s received the necklace from Robin just in time to “prove” her innocence, forced to promise Guy that she will marry him.

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I want to concede right away that a good deal of the success of this sequence has to do with strongly effective editing — it’s certainly done “for the videogame generation” and in a way that accentuates Armitage’s performance in particular. That admitted, I now want to look at his performance in more detail.

The first portion of the sequence opens with Sir Edward (Michael Elwyn) at table with Guy, offering him hospitality. Guy’s response couldn’t be more disdainful, and Armitage draws out his response — which involves a rude spitting into his plate, what feels like a deliberately grobian indication of his scorn for Edward’s offer, and a direct look across the table into Edward’s eyes that offers the older man a direct status challenge — to the hilt.

It’s hard for me to say how just much I like this choice of a way for Guy to indicate his purpose. Armitage winds Guy up so tightly through this entire scene, and the choice of iron, freezing rage as the primary driver of his psyche is masterful in that, much more so than anger, rage gives us an indication as to the inner shame of the character. Moreover, there’s something about the way that Armitage’s face gets shot or lit in these scenes — his eyes taking over his entire face and, in their activity, jarring the impact on the viewer of the (shaming, shamed and) bowed position of his head.

We can see that lighting impact here and its effect — as Guy indicates, with feigned bravado and apparent irony, that he doesn’t know where Marian (Lucy Griffiths) is, Armitage’s eyes move out of view with the twist of his chin,

but by the time he moves his chin back into center and his visible eye back into the light, his face against wears that so typically Guy combination of anger and weariness — a sort of introspection that implies that he is so angry about what’s happened that he simultaneously doesn’t care any more and can’t bear to confront his memory that he used to care so much.

His response to Edward’s worry that Guy might have hurt Marian replays equally this status conflict between low-level, betrayed, resentful party

and powerful person who scorns any possibility that Edward can thwart him.

Generally in Armitage’s repertoire of facial gestures, there’s a neat contrast between the way that he forcefully moves his lips out for enunciation and the scornful way that he tends to hold them away from his teeth, making that emotion much more intense for the viewer. Guy in particular was great at that gesture (as, for example, in 2.6), using Armitage’s brief upper lip to combine scorn and fatigue in his sneer.

At that point, Marian bursts in, and the low tone of Guy’s response (“speak of the devil”) indicates both tedium and danger. Indeed, Armitage seems to pair these reactions in Guy’s response, insofar as one suspects that if he’s angry as he must be about the betrayals, the tedium is merely ironic — and yet, on some level, to be betrayed is exactly what Guy expects, so that it is only painful that his wish-object has done it, not so much that it has happened yet again. Now Guy will have to treat Marian in the same way he’s been treating problematic villagers all along, but one wonders whether his emotions will let him.

He won’t even look at her, he’s so beside himself. Armitage inserts a series of Guy’s characteristic flat affect microexpressions,

but they are strong odds with the intense resentment that practically streams from every pore.

The sequence begins to gain energy as Guy asks about the location of the necklace. He’s still basically at flat affect as he begins to insist,

so that we are not expecting what comes next, as Edward ventures to intervene and Guy’s engine of rage goes from zero to sixty in a split second. Now everything that’s been hidden under that mask comes to light, but so quickly, in a half second of film, that we as viewers pick up on mood rather than explicit expression.

What I find interesting about this sequence is not so much the violence (although it does, given the way the sequence is edited, appear to come out of nowhere) as the way that the suddenness reveals something we haven’t completely seen in Guy’s demeanor so far, even if we’ve suspected it’s there — a sort of bloodlust for vengeance, which seems to serve to reestablish Guy’s open authority over Marilyn as the first third of the scenes ends.

To be continued tomorrow sometime. Sorry, have to go to bed. Continues here.

~ by Servetus on February 15, 2014.