The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition
MGM, $19.98Twenty years on, The Princess Bride comes off less as a sweet children’s movie and more as a savvy precursor to Adaptation. Sure, it’s chock-full of confections like a dazzling beautiful princess (Robin Wright), a hulking ogre (the late Andre the Giant), a six-fingered baddie (Christopher Guest), and the dreamy pirate/hero (Cary Elwes) who saves the day. But it’s, at its core, a writer’s film about the creative process. The screenwriting god William Goldman (Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Misery) adapted his own novel into the screenplay, but the original idea came from telling bedtime stories to his daughters. He asked them once what kind of story they’d like. One said a princess story; the other voted for a bride story. You get the idea. But the novel/screenplay didn’t really jell until Goldman got the idea to tell a double story: the fairy tale and the story of a grandfather (Peter Falk) reading it to a semihostile grandson (Fred Savage). The boy grimaces as lovey-dovey kissing scenes are read and critiques the old man’s destruction of the suspenseful climax of a confrontation between the princess and a monstrous sea creature. Don’t tell me Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wasn’t at least subconsciously inspired by Goldman. Sure, the arty artifice in The Princess Bride is awash in just plain good – and fun – storytelling. It’s enough to make me forgive Billy Crystal’s cringe-worthy overacting.
The 20th-anniversary DVD comes complete with the obligatory featurettes. We’ve got the actors reminiscing and Mandy Patinkin actually admitting to crying after seeing the film’s rough cut, so convinced was he that he would never find such a meaty role again. I’d love more words of wisdom from the always hilarious Wallace Shawn and something – anything – from Goldman, but that’s a minor quibble. Goldman does get his due in a featurette in which an academic ponders the fairy tale and how Goldman merged the genre’s archetypes into something shiny new. Oh, and there’s a rather shallow piece on filmic swordplay plus a forgettable video game. But this is about the film, which is just as magical 20 years on. Buy it for the kid inside you who still dreams.
This article appears in December 14 • 2007.