Review: Stardust

The Family Three headed out to see Stardust last night, and what follows are my thoughts on it. Perhaps Tammy will supply her own take on the film at some point. (Depending on your definition of such things, Spoilers may follow.)

There's always a challenge - for me, anyway - in evaluating a movie that's based on something that I'm already familiar with. Clearly, a huge part of the success of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy came from his ability to satisfy not only the newcomers who came to the theatre having had little or no experience with the books - myself included - but also the Tolkien enthusiasts who were almost certainly expecting to find the adaptation lacking. It was interesting to me that, with each successive film, the amount of time the fans spent talking about what was missing or changed decreased in lockstep with their appreciation for the job that Jackson had done in distilling the spirit of each book into a mere three (or four) hours of thrilling story. For that reason, I think The Lord of the Rings, regarded collectively as a twelve-ish hour masterpiece, stands as one of the greatest movie adaptations ever, in terms of the complexity of the source material and its success with fans and non-fans alike.

Adapting Stardust, the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, represents something of a similarly daunting task. While nowhere nearly as deep or as long as The Lord of the Rings, the tale of Tristan and Yvaine, in its own way, embodies the antithesis of what you'd expect to find in a typical film. For example, the division between reality and fantasy appears at first glance to be simply the low stone barrier that separates the village of Wall from whatever lies beyond its namesake. And yet there's less difference between the two than you might think, as author Gaiman makes clear in his text. He certainly wasn't writing the classic "down the rabbit hole / over the rainbow / into the wardrobe" story in which everything changes upon passage from one realm to another. Instead, he was juxtaposing the two more closely than that, and perhaps suggesting that a hundred and fifty years ago, they were more intertwined than separate. And how do you convey a message as subtle as that in a film? (In this case, I'd say they didn't.)

Similarly, the love story within the graphic novel doesn't really bloom until its final pages, when the hero finally, unquestionably understands that it's Yvaine he loves, and not Victoria. Until that point, he's rather singularly followed his original quest, which was the retrieval of the fallen star and presentation of it to the object of his desire. We, the readers, appreciate the folly of his path, both in terms of the unlikelihood of its success and the worthlessness of its achievement, but Tristan is achingly unaware of these things right up until the end. That sort of delayed gratification is out-of-step with today's movie audiences, and so, not surprisingly, the decision was made to speed along the romance and even show its consummation prior to the story's conclusion.

And there are other impediments that resulted in significant changes upon moving to film: almost the first quarter of the original story concerns the misadventures of the eventual father of the hero, delaying the central character's arrival well beyond what one would normally expect; for all of his innate goodness, Tristan just isn't the brightest bulb in the pack, and at times is as likely to stumble onto a solution as he is to divine it; and so on. In each case, what showed up on celluloid was more standard fare, losing some of the charm of the graphic novel, for those who knew it.

So as I sat in the theatre watching Stardust, the movie, play out before my eyes, I was trying not to compare it to the source material that I knew so well. Instead, I wanted to regard it as a standalone tale, and like, love or loathe it as such. Since I was in the company of two women who had never read the original, I was also taking some of my cues from how they reacted to it.

Most jarring, for me, was the "amping up" of the Captain Shakespeare character, as portrayed by Robert DeNiro. Transforming him into an overt homosexual/transvestite, while delivering lots in the way of comic relief, felt very un-Gaiman-like, as well as several times more over-the-top than just about anything else in the production. I'm not convinced that anything was added to the experience by that change, and it seemed to push the movie into silly territory, rather than being funny.

Other than DeNiro's scenery-chewing, the acting was uniformly good throughout. Michelle Pfeiffer, in particular, deserves a lot of credit for allowing herself to be made to look as ugly as she did. Charlie Cox and Claire Danes were both believable in their evolving relationship, which is obviously critical to a central romance. No one really "wowed" me among the cast, but that's OK when everyone's doing their job.

In the end, I think that Stardust's a very good movie, but not a great one. It captured a lot of the humour, adventure and compassion of Gaiman and Vess's superior work, but missed the mark as far as tightness of plot is concerned. One of the hallmarks of a Neil Gaiman story is that virtually nothing is thrown away. The most casual piece of dialogue or plot development magically ends up having some greater significance by the time you close the book for the last time, and even knowing that about him, he still catches you off guard more often than not. In the film, the places where part of his idea was retained but not all of it stood out like sore thumbs. The spell that the witch queen puts on Madame Semele, making it impossible for Semele to see the star, for example, has essentially no payoff in the film, whereas in the original story it was pivotal to saving Yvaine at one point. Simiarly, the burning of Tristan's hand provided a means for the two leads to form a stronger bond, almost none of which made it into the adaptation. And the unicorn, so important to several events in the novel, seems completely inexplicable in its existence (and lacking in closure as far as its eventual fate) in the film version. Those are just three examples among many, but they're the sorts of moments that resonate with a reader; I can't help but wonder if their absence still allowed for as magical a movie-going experience. Or, put another way, is 50 - 60% of Neil Gaiman's genius still worth seeing? I think it definitely is; it just could've been so much better.

Rating: ***