May 4, 2015
Many people (myself included) consider the film The Princess Bride to be a classic. The cast is charming, the dialogue is clever...it's just a fun movie. The book is just as much fun to read, and there are few differences between the book and film to speak of; in fact, much of the dialogue, including the best lines, are used verbatim. No surprise, since Goldman, a celebrated screenwriter, wrote the adaptation himself.
Goldman uses a fictional version of himself as the framing device. He tells the story of himself as a kid with pneumonia, whose father, an immigrant of the fictional country of Florin, reads him a classic tale from his homeland: The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern. This launches the boy's love for fantasy literature, and leads him to his career as a writer. Years later, he finds a rare copy of the book for his son. When Jason, a fat boy, reveals that he tried to read the book, the grown Goldman is baffled. He looks at the book for the first time, having only ever heard the story when his father read it aloud, and he finds that it is much longer than his father let on. Daddy Goldman only read the "good parts." So Goldman decides to write an abridgment, making the story more accessible to young readers and recreating the story as he'd known and loved it.
That's obviously very different from the movie. It's only framed by Fred Savage (sick in bed) getting the book read to him by his grandfather (Columbo, I think). So all of the stuff about Goldman and his fictional son and loveless marriage with his fictional wife is different.
We also get more background on the characters, of course. We see more of Buttercup's animosity towards Westley when they were young, plus her development into the most beautiful woman in the world. The movie doesn't emphasize her lack of formal education as much as the book does; for instance, she dislikes numbers and mixes up words like "syllable" and "syllabub." So to be perfectly honest, Buttercup in the book is little more than a pretty face with a tendency to be stubborn. I felt like the perfection that is Robin Wright (yass, queen!) gave real life to the character.
Inigo and Fezzik were just as wonderful here as in the movie. You actually get to see when the sadistic count kills Domingo Montoya, and Inigo's years to training to be good enough to fight the expert swordsman. Fezzik has an interesting childhood, becoming a professional fighter at a young age to please his parents, though the booing he endures when he wins so easily kills his self esteem. Poor Fezzik! Andre the Giant played him perfectly.
25 years after the publication of the original novel, Goldman added on a little more. He gave an update on his fictional persona's life: fat Jason became a fit bodybuilder and a sex therapist, and while Goldman's wife eventually left him, his career as a screenwriter had continued success (that part is true). His grandson wants him to abridge Morgenstern's follow-up to The Princess Bride, but he only decides to do it when he's informed by the late Morgenstern's lawyer that he can't: the job's already gone to a fictional version of Stephen King. King suggests that Goldman abridge the first chapter; he personally doesn't want to, but his relatives in Florin have applied pressure, and he kinda thinks he can do a better job than Goldman. So we only get a single chapter of the unfinished follow-up, "Buttercup's Baby." It was okay, I guess, but I'm not exactly peeved that Goldman didn't go on to just write the whole sequel.
This is a rare case where the movie is better than the book. The book is still very good, but the movie is phenomenal. I also think that this is a situation where the author using himself as a fictional character worked out...it doesn't always. But I'm glad that the movie focused on the main plot, and not on fictionalGoldman himself.
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