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With apologies to Sibelian, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to wax fanboy over the film. Maybe the summary could have been “A host of stars bring Neil Gaiman’s novel to life on the big screen. Or not.” However.
SPOILERS for the film and book. Probably.
Stardust might actually have convinced me not to go and see any more blockbuster adaptations of novels for a while.
Not actually because it was such a bad film, because compared to other films of this type it’s relatively above-average, and not because it departs from the details of what it’s adapted from because that’s usually a fairly sensible, if not inevitable approach, but because these films have a tendency to so badly misjudge the tone and meaning of the source material whilst largely confining themselves to the characters, situations and events of the original. Stardust isn’t the worst of these I’ve seen over the past year, but in opposition to what Sibelian said, this is exactly the style of filmmaking that personally I need a break from. The benefits of a relatively conservative approach to this type of filmmaking, as seen in say The Chronicles of Narnia, where the characters and plot are recognisable versions of the original, where some of the iffier moments in the source material is dropped, some of the more prosaic elements are expanded upon or updated, is overall there’s that satisfying feeling of watching the filmic version of something you enjoyed in all its high-budget visual spectacle. This doesn’t happen in Stardust.
If someone had described the film to me as one featuring bloodthirsty witches, wraiths and sky pirates battling over the power of a star, I might have been reasonably tempted, the issue of the absence of pig slaughtering dragons aside. However, my experience of watching Stardust, despite several enjoyable moments, was of witnessing the square peg of Gaiman’s “Romance Within The Realm of Faerie” being forced through the round hole of Hollywood’s expectations of what a comedic epic fantasy should look like. With the result that, somewhat glaringly, they missed what genre the film should have been.
It might sound odd, but one of the worst things about the film for me was the score. At every opportunity there intruded this bombastic fantasy soundtrack, which disappeared for the inappropriate characters bits, before returning almost as quickly for the next set piece. It completely set the tone of the film for me, and was jarringly inappropriate in places. The thing about Stardust (the book) is that it’s an essentially gentle story. The worst excesses of twee-ness are delicately punctured by Gaiman’s writing, which, if you don’t stop to dwell on it overmuch, well, actually I quite liked. There is, simply, not much of an adventure story in the novel, or rather, the adventure story that is there is much less significant than the development of the characters and some gentle satire about young men who go in search of their heart’s desire and learn to grow up, and about the more practical truths that might lie behind old stories. It might seem an extreme or overly personal reaction to the film, but while it’s largely deeply inoffensive and occasionally amusing, my overall reaction was to how wrong some of it was. There was no need for airships that swooped dramatically rather than sailed gracefully, and given that, I would rather have had an entirely fresh explanation for that part of the film rather than one which serves no purpose but to entertain through some not even particularly swish visuals.
There were, I thought, promising moments, where it felt like this could be an irreverent film about fairy tales. I thought Rupert Everett’s character had that sort of knowing look about what role he might be expected to play, but that sort of wit, much like his character, was soon pushed out of the window. Ba-boom. There are other bright moments - it’s good to see Mark Heap and Julian Rhind-Tutt (amongst other Brit comedic talent) getting such prominent, if small roles, and, um… that’s actually all I can recall to be honest. And even then, all the comedic roles (if you’re a fan of De Niro’s comic performances, well, it’s a matter of taste I suppose) in the film are juvenile, jarringly scene-breaking distractions from the main plot.
Ah yes. The main plot. As above really. Compared to a novel in which the two lead characters have an antagonistic relationship, share insults and danger, and there is at least an off-page description of all the time they spend together before watching them fall in love, the film concentrates on the action and adventure and leaves the romance feeling generic and typical. Together, both actors struggle to even suggest attitudes moving from one extreme to the other, but perhaps even more strangely, in the montage(!) where they are shown bonding, they do so, crucially, through another character. That is, another character doesn’t bring them together, but that the audience, watching Captain Shakespeare (good lord) and Tristan duelling, and then Captain Shakespeare, um, teaching Yvaine to play piano(?), is supposed to infer that because they spent an enjoyable time in the same vicinity as the other person as they flowered in the company of the same individual, that they would magically fall for one another? I’d really like others to confirm if that was how it appeared to them because it seems so utterly bizarre as a central theme of the film.
Given that we’re supposed to believe this romance takes place in a week (rather than the months of the original), there was one moment which stood out as emblematic of the film’s mishandling of the source events. In the novel Tristran goes on his quest, eventually finds what he’s looking for, grows up a bit, gets a bit scruffy looking, discovers that it’s not quite what he thinks it is and comes back home changed and somewhat improved, and apologises for being such a buffoon. So far so predictable. In the film Tristan finds the object of his quest immediately, travels along, gets some sort of a magical makeover, doesn’t grow up, goes back home looking different and then goes off to defeat the arch-villain of the piece. Instead of a scene where a humbler, somewhat less naïve boy corrects his mistake to a proud, but abashed young lady and her equally proud companion, we get a cocky young man who comes back to make a spiteful point to a young lady presented as selfish and insincere, before he threatens her beau with his new moves. It’s ugly storytelling. The logic that says that Tristan has to have longer hair in the film because he does by the end of the book, while dispensing with any of the reasons or logic for that difference, for me, ruins the idea that the film can be considered as an independent or consistent work. It’s not necessarily high art to show that level of character development, but to restrict oneself to the image of that transformation while ignoring its logic is just stupid beyond belief!
There are various changes and introductions that I disliked not so much because they were different but because they subtracted from the film as a whole. I’m trying not to just list all the things that annoyed me I’ll mention one that maybe illustrates this: when Tristan is trying to get across the wall, and the guardian takes him out ninja style, that’s hilarious, and unexpected, because, y’know, he’s old right? And not overtly a ninja. But all the energy of that scene is directed inwards, at confounding the audience’s expectations for that moment of quick spectacle and easy humour. But at the same time it moves that energy away from feeding the reality of the film, the contrast between a staid English society and the world of Faerie on the other side.
The various magical items in the film are also used differently. Whilst in the book the indirect way in which they are introduced is used so that they suggest a much larger world full of such enchantments, in the film each one, the snowdrop, the obsidian daggers, the candles, is given a prominence their individual wow! cool! factor to the exclusion of other things. There’s also, and I realise this might seem a small point, the fact that Tristan seems to take every manifestation of this unearthly realm in his stride, as if every young Victorian man would commonly come across such things, them being so superstitious and all. It was just careless. They could have done something with Tristan’s half-belonging to that world but once his birth was recounted it was never used significantly again. I mean, if you’re going to have that, why not use it for something? There’s no appearance, from what I could see, of the idea that fairy tales operate under certain rules, that sense that this world beyond the wall was somehow ontologically different, just that it had a higher budget for spectacle. On a similar note, when Dishwater Sal is cursed not to see or feel the star, rather than appreciate the sort of internal logic of this sort of dictum, we need to see the star throw herself against the witch and bounce off as an example of these two clashing paradigms, as if the audience were too stupid to comprehend the idea without it being physically demonstrated. There’s (and I suppose the conclusion is guilty of this as well) an equation being made that teh magicks = special effects, which is lazy, and detracts from anything that might have made the film different or memorable. As it is even the effects are fairly forgettable, and in places cheap looking: the various shrinking transformations bring to mind (and indeed were later confirmed to be comparable to) The Witches, which if anyone’s looking for an enchanting, magical, internally consistent film I recommend.
So with all due friendliness for Sibelian, I really genuinely don’t understand what was so magical or refreshingly original about this style of filmmaking. At best it was utter wait-for-the-dvd fare, at its worst it was moronic, false and charmless. As I said, it’s better than a lot of films of its type, but in terms of cinema that lives in its own world, that one can be passionate about, all the energy of this film was leeched out by its adherence to the details of a book whose charms, whatever they may be, it fails to emulate. Apologies for the lengthy review. |
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