The Princess Bride: Let Me Sum Up
There are certain films that one must first be exposed to as a child in order to still enjoy as an adult. Take Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. A timeless classic, but not necessarily one that glues itself to the imagination in adulthood. Or Clue, a movie that seeps into the comic DNA at age thirteen (“Mr. Body’s body!”—is that witty or what?) but becomes almost gratingly over-the-top to the grown-up ear. Before revisiting The Princess Bride, I worried it would fall into this category of film. It’s not that I suspected it wouldn’t “hold up”—it’s a whip-smart, widely beloved film, not some obscure Luke Perry vehicle I stumbled upon in the wrong sleeve at Blockbuster in 1993. But it had been a while. My concern was that after I rewatched it as an adult, I would find it had somehow been demoted to a less magical place in my memory. Because The Princess Bride does warrant the word magical. This is a movie in which the central action is Peter Falk reading a book.
Like many American children of the late eighties, I cannot count how many times I’ve seen The Princess Bride. Even the addition of a sixth finger on my right hand would not speed the process. For my generation, this is not just a movie; it’s a facet of our adolescence and a building block of our world-view. To call the movie influential, personally or culturally, would be an understatement. It’s why I know the words putrescence (real) and hippopotamic (real) and blave (fake). It’s how I first learned about hydraulics and hangovers (though the idea that Inigo was once so drunk he “couldn’t buy brandy” made zero sense to me as a kid and makes only marginally more sense to me as an adult). It’s where I heard the only pickup line worth deploying: “Please consider me as an alternative to suicide.” It’s why people of a certain demographic don’t get married, they get “MAH-weed.” It had a palpable effect inside Hollywood as well. The film’s opening—a tight shot on a screen showing a video game (being played by Fred Savage, as a young kid home sick from school)—would be replicated in the more commercially successful Big less than a year after The Princess Bride’srelease. The Princess Bride may have had a lackluster opening in theaters in 1987, but by the early nineties it had become something of a VHS phenomenon. And now? It is a statistical fact that every twenty seconds, someone in America is instructed to “have fun storming the castle.”
In addition to The Princess Bride’s more obvious charms—the satirical humor, the range of insults, the perpetually windblown blonds, the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane cameos of the century—it manages to extract the exact tone and structure of William Goldman’s novel and put it onto the screen, like one of those little New England houses that gets airlifted and dropped onto the roof of a New York City apartment building (yes, this happens). With most adaptations, a few screws come loose in the process. But Goldman’s script and Rob Reiner’s direction of this story within a story are so adroit, one can only cringe at the idea of the material in anyone else’s hands. The tale of Westley (Cary Elwes) and Buttercup (Robin Wright) and their madcap medieval adventures is like a universal blood type, embraced by theater geeks, cool kids, romantics, loners, and artists. “Something for everyone” is not always a good selling point—not for viewers who fancy themselves as having tailored taste—yet who wouldn’t love The Princess Bride? Only a miserable, vomitous mass, that’s who.
Friendship—loyal, ribbing, hard-won, true—can actually happen. Kids of all ages know this. It may play out differently in real life—perhaps “breaking down a door for your friend so they can kill someone” takes the form of helping a friend move apartments or reporting on the whereabouts of his or her ex upon request—but friendships of this nature have more wherewithal than Westley and Buttercup’s relationship. The Inigo/Fezzik (“and kind of Westley”) dynamic is responsible for the magic in The Princess Bride that crosses generations. Here are outsiders who band together. Here are reminders that life is less about perfect romances between perfect people than it is about imperfect friendships with imperfect people.
At the end of The Princess Bride the book, after our heroes have all safely ridden off into the sunset, Goldman writes: “I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” This is the other way in which Zoe’s assessment about the realism of the material is both right and wrong. Like life itself, The Princess Bride is ridiculous on the outside but contains much truth on the inside. The movie is a miracle pill. Buried in the farce is a heartfelt and sincere worldview, one that knows pure magic can actually happen, no matter your age.
Me: You were right, that was fun.
Zoe: Can we go outside and jump on the trampoline now?
Me: Okay, but don’t break your face. Your mom will kill me.
Zoe: As you wish.
Me: That’s my line.
Zoe: No, it’s not.
Me: Yes, it is.
Zoe: No, it’s not.
Me: We can’t go on like this.
Zoe: Yes, we can.
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