Stardust, More or Less
When Eileene and I came out of the theater after watching Stardust, my opening comment was that it made me think of The Princess Bride. I thought the comparison insightful, but Eileene quickly disabused me of the notion. Apparently a lot of people have had the same thought. The really odd part is that different viewers are struck by similarities of an entirely different nature.
The gross similarities are there: swashbuckling fantasy, consciously framed as a fairy tale, complete with grandfatherly narrator. A clean-cut youth engaged in a three-cornered struggle for his true love. Dei ex machina materialize when necessary to assure he triumphs. Supporting characters are far more interesting than the protagonists. But the similarities lie in presentation, the film as a production, as much as they do in the plot elements. One blogger likens the films for the difficulty of marketing the movies, as reflected in their awkward trailers. Is it an action-adventure? A children’s matinee? A satire of the fairy tale? Because the movie itself can’t quite settle on a serious or silly tone, it’s hard for the audience to know what it’s getting, or for the ads to tell them. (A problem shared by the 1999 version of The Mummy.) Another blogger discusses the benefits and problems of using ten-dollar actors to fill bit parts, as both movies do.
What made me see The Princess Bride in Stardust was their relationship to the respective books. Stardust began as a comic book, which was translated to a book before becoming a screenplay. The book version was the first that I encountered, for both Stardust and The Princess Bride, so I was conscious of the compromises made to bring the material to the screen.
I adored the book version of The Princess Bride. While it was a satire, and was—gratingly—punctuated by yammering about the fictitious author S. Morgenstern’s original satirical content, it could be read as an unabashed romantic adventure, and so I read it. Repeatedly. I could recite my favorite passages at length. I was hurt when almost none of those passages actually made it into the movie: Inigo’s childhood, Fezzik’s childhood, the descent into the Zoo of Death. I was equally upset to see other scenes turned wholly farcical, with no attempt at retaining the original tone. The duel on the Cliffs of Insanity, with gymnastic swings and cartoon music in place of proper fencing was, for me, a travesty, like watching JarJar Binks was for the Star Wars fans who expected to relive their childhood delight at the original Star Wars. I can understand why the movie did these things; there simply wasn’t time for what were, technically, side stories, and capturing the internal narrative essential to the drama of the swordplay would have been impossible. Nonetheless, I remain embittered toward the movie in a way that mystifies my geeky friends, all of whom love the movie. (Some have read the book since, but none read the book first.)
Stardust grapples with the same problems, and resolves them in much the same way, slipping into easy gags when maintaining a more earnest, more engaging tone becomes too difficult. It drops scenes of less immediate importance to the plot, but essential to establishing a tone, and loses a degree of audience engagement. Sometimes these cut corners made me roll my eyes; other times, they improved on the book, which, to me, was a little too long and a little too slow. Cutting to the chase was, at times, a positive improvement. In this sense, Stardust the movie is superior to The Princess Bride movie; it improved on its source. But I think that’s more a measure of the quality of the respective sources.
In the final analysis, the film version of Stardust was good, but a long way from perfect, and bears small signs of parts left out. Michelle Pfeiffer is effective as the witch, Lamia, as is Mark Strong as the wicked Prince Septimus. DeNiro takes his role too far, but the audience around me seemed to enjoy it. The portrayal of witches’ treacherous sisterhood (literal and figurative) is interesting, as is the equally treacherous system of succession for the throne. Billy and Bernard (male and female) raise a smile. Victoria and Humphrey, snobs of young Tristan’s home village, are just right. About the only actors to come up lacking were the hero and heroine. Once you’re past the popcorn-crunching fun, though, there’s not much under the hood. Readers who loved the book should enter the theater with modest expectations, lest they find something missing, as I did Inigo’s past.