Romance and anti-Romance

Neil Gaiman's American Gods is one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years.  It's gritty, ironic, exciting, grimly funny, satirical, bloody, and, despite the fact that many of the characters are...well...gods...true to life.  I don't mean that it's realistic, although it is in its views of American life and culture.  I mean that in it Gaiman shows an understanding of how people think and feel and believe that is true,

His novel Stardust is nothing like American Gods.  It's sentimental, earnest, full of incident but somehow still lacking in action, and as true to life as any fairy tale, which ought not to be a criticism, because it is a fairy tale---Stardust reminds me a lot of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that The Snow Queen was one of Gaiman's models.  But while Andersen's stories do tend to be maudlin, they have the virtue of also being, usually, unhappy.  Stardust is maudlin but ends happily, in a mawkish, maudlin way that's almost an apology for itself.

Stardust is a love story but it isn't either romantic or erotic and it doesn't say very much about the nature of love or of the characters of people in love.  Tristan and the Star fall in love because that's what the main characters in love stories do.

In short, Stardust is as artificial and un-true to life as American Gods is realistic and truthful and, read together, the two books would seem to have been written in order to cancel each other's effects out, in a matter meets anti-matter negation.  In fact, it's hard for me to believe that the same writer who wrote Stardust also wrote American Gods and the Sandman comic books.

Yes, I called the Sandman books comic books and not graphic novels.  Are we going to have this argument again?

But in adapting Stardust for the movies director and screenwriter Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman seem to have been inspired more by the writer of American Gods and the Sandman than by the author of their source material---and more by the movie The Princess Bride.  It appears to be a coincidence that Jane Goldman shares the same last name as the creator of the romance of Buttercup and the Dread Pirate Roberts.---They put everything into the script that Gaiman left out of the novel, humor, action, adventure, sex, actual romance, an interesting cast of supporting characters, compelling villains, and pirates!

The pirates and the villains make the movie.

Robert DiNiro as the pirate captain?  Ok, maybe a little over the top.  Michelle Pfeiffer too.  They're both having a bit too much fun playing far outside their usual movie star personas.  Mark Strong as the murderous Prince Septimus, though, adds a true swashbuckler's dash, demonstrating that a good villain can be as heroic in his villainy as a hero is heroic in his good deed doing.  Vaughn and Goldman made a good choice in bringing the novel's background story of the bloody succession of the throne of Stormhold into the main action of the movie's plot.

Stardust is a fun film.  It's not going to rival Princess Bride as a classic.  For one thing, it's not as quotable.  For another, Mandy Patinkin isn't in it.

"Hello.  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."

Sorry.

Had to say it.

"You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

Sorry, again.

I enjoyed Stardust while watching it but...

It left me feeling a little cold at the end.  I had the same feeling at the end of The Golden Compass, and I think it was for similar reasons.

I think both movies failed to make it clear why it was important that their main characters get from here to there.

That's a considerable problem in The Golden Compass, since the fate of the world is supposed to be at stake.  In Stardust all that is at risk is the happiness of the two main characters.  So we really need to care about those two characters.  In the book Tristan and Yvaine are ciphers.  Our only reason for caring for them is that they are young people in love and if you happen to be an old grump like me who thinks that stories about young people in love are essentially comedies that isn't reason enough.  There should be jokes.

Vaughn and Goldman give their romantic leads some good jokes.  But just a few.  Yvaine and Tristan fall in love only because they are the leads in a love story and the only reason to root for them is that they are leads in a love story.

They are at least attractive and charming leads, though.  At any rate, the actors who play them are.  Charlie Cox does a fine job of transforming Tristan from the Simple character of old fairy tales to a roguish swashbuckling young hero in the Dumas mold.  Claire Danes shines even without the special effects that make her actually shine in certain scenes.  But Danes must be one of the oddest looking pretty woman  working in Hollywood.  Her features are too broad for a conventional ingenue and, although this seems to be a strange thing to say about an actress, too expressive for the big screen.  She has to act against the natural shape of her face and fight against the inclinations of her own muscles.  Her smile wants to be big and mischievous when she needs it to be sweet and demure, her mouth will not shape itself into a pout and the the only way it will manage a frown is by skipping all the states of emotion between mildly put out and absolute fury to register a near homicidal rage, and her eyes resist narrowing, they always want to open wider.

Hers is a face made for comedy.  Which is to say it's a face made for a true to life love story, not a fairy tale.

Neil Gaiman, by the way, is a blogger.

Stardust and The Princess Bride and most of the movies I've reviewed here are available on DVD through my aStore.  Remember, save a blogger from begging:  Buy stuff!

Comments

[Ken Houghton]

"In Stardust all that is at risk is the happiness of the two main characters."

I thought it was rather clear that if Mrs. David E. Kelley and her sisters have their way, MUCH more is at stake for the rest of the world.

[Mike]

"Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

[velvet goldmine]

I've gotten really intrigued by Neil Gaiman in a rather back-end way; an offbeat perfume company I admire has dozens of perfumes based on his work -- there's a Stardust line with a different scent meant to capture each of the major characters, there's an American Gods line of scents, and a few others.

If I were a boy I suppose I'd know all about his stuff, but trust me to get interested in the girliest of girly ways. (Perfume, not Lance Mannion.)

[Lance]

Ken Houghton: I thought it was rather clear that if Mrs. David E. Kelley and her sisters have their way, MUCH more is at stake for the rest of the world.

See, Ken, this wasn't clear to me. It seemed to me that if they got their hands on the Star's heart they were just going to give themselves another half dozen centuries of typical fairy tale witches' witchery. What scene did I miss?

[Linkmeister]

Oh, dear. A New Year's Resolution: I will pull A Princess Bride DVD off the TV cart where it's been for two years and watch it for the first time before...before...well, before the taxes are due.

There. I'm publicly committed to doing something.

[velvet goldmine]

LInkmeister: Don't do it! Everyone who watches it becomes obsessed with it. It's better to just leave it alone. Take it from someone who has chased her children around the house with a broom and the Inigo Montoya speech since they were toddlers.

[Demosthenes]

Gaiman isn't just a blogger. He's practically the Ur-Blogger. He's been doing it for ages and doing it very, very well.

(Also, I shouldn't read posts in reverse-chronological order.)

VG: I assume you're referring to the "black phoenix alchemy lab"? Oddly enough, there have been a number of Gaiman fans (they are absolutely LEGION and significantly "girly") who discovered BPAL through the scents based on his work.

A neater bit of cross-promotion, I've rarely seen.

As for Golden Compass, I think it faced the same problem that an adaptation of American Gods would face: pacing issues that come from adapting a rather far-flung novel to film.

It's like adapting The Watchmen: it can be done, but there's a gigantic risk that it will lose its heart and soul in the process.

[velvet goldmine]

Demosthenes: Yes, it's BPAL. Since I've yet to sampled any of their scents or an NG books yet, I can't speak to the sensory synergy; can you?

But certainly the BPAL forum posters themselves are a pretty ardent and active community, so I can see why the twain would meet.