Usually I don’t read the press release for a movie, or the production notes, as they like to dignify themselves. I tend to see them as a waste of paper, because one can get the information on the internet, for which trees did not have to die. Certainly I never read the notes before seeing a film: one is in danger of being momentarily distracted by the hype, by the endless concatenations of sticky compliments attached to everyone involved. They’re all towering geniuses, the pre-eminent actor of their time, a white-hot talent out of nowhere …
Sometimes, though, I do grab the production notes. Sometimes the presentation is seductive; sometimes I need something to glance at over coffee, between previews, when I’ve read the free copy of The Citizen, which only takes about two minutes.
And sometimes the production notes are irksome, like those for Disturbia, which I have commented on — it’s a direct remake of Rear Window, but the production notes go on about how this original idea came to the scriptwriter in a flash while driving through the suburbs of California. Oh, come on!
In the case of Stardust, the production notes are largely irrelevant but make one laugh a little. This is a big fantasy adventure based on Neil Gaiman’s bestselling novel and the press release goes into all that stuff about how Gaiman didn’t want to sell the rights until director Matthew Vaughan convinced him with his love of the story and his amazing vision for the movie. This is routine publicity gumph; I must have read that about scores of movies already.
But you do wonder when they talk about the movie’s ‘blistering pace”, when it hardly proceeds at a rush. Do they just say that, as a matter of course, about all movies they’re promoting? You wonder why they refer to women but not male actors as ‘stunning” — meaning their beauty. Women are commended for their looks; men for their abilities. And then there’s the part about how Stardust has Robert DeNiro ‘showing a side of himself that’s never been seen before”. A ‘side of himself”? This from the man who can barely utter a full sentence on Oprah? He’s an actor, for heaven’s sake, and in this role he’s trying a little something he hasn’t done before, as actors have to do every few decades.
Be that as it may, I can assert that Stardust is very entertaining. We start in the little English village of Wall, so-named because it has a wall running along its periphery and that wall is guarded by an ancient fellow with a big stick. He guards it thus because the wall is in fact the boundary between the real world and the magical land of Stormhold, à la Narnia. Here, though, the contrast isn’t between depleted real world and richly caparisoned magic world, as in the Narnia stories; the village of Wall looks quite pleasant.
Trying to impress Wall’s cutest girl, young Tristan Thorne (Charlie Cox) crosses the wall in search of a fallen star. The star turns out to have female form (the ‘stunning” Claire Danes) and a host of adventures now befall the two of them. There are a few other people after the star as well, in particular the heirs to the throne of Stormhold (King Peter O’Toole having croaked within a few minutes of his appearance on screen) and Lamia, a witch desperate for power and regeneration after years of decay.
Lamia is played by Michelle Pfeiffer and, as she did in the recent musical of Hairspray, she makes a good bitch — I mean witch. She and her two sisters (as in Macbeth, witches here come in threes) are rather unpleasant characters, given to butchering various creatures and examining their entrails for oracles. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to do this kind of thing all the time, but nowadays it has gone out of fashion. Instead, we just read the star signs in the newspaper.
On the chase, Lamia casts some enjoyable and visually impressive spells, while battling with her looks all the way. She has temporary beauty cover, but she’s really a few centuries old, which plays hell with the skin tone. In Stardust, her transformations back and forth between aged crone and stunning Pfeifferesque beauty begin to feel like a profound meditation on stardom, ageing and plastic surgery.
Playing Captain Shakespeare (no relation), DeNiro does his part well enough, particularly as the only character here with a full-on American accent. Not that you’d mistake him for anyone but Robert DeNiro, new ‘side of himself” or not. This sky captain also manages to teach Tristan some excellent sword-fighting skills from scratch — amazing what you can learn in a quick montage sequence.
There is much to laugh at in Stardust and much of that is intentional. It has an air of slightly off-key whimsy, which goes well with the fairy tale storyline; unlike many other big-budget fantasies, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. But then I suppose it’s not saving the whole of Middle Earth from The Dark Lord or whatever, which is a relief. Stardust has some of the welcome irony and wit of an old swashbuckler; it even has some Terry Gilliam in its genes (which applies to look as well as tone).
Cox makes a fine lead as Tristan, with the right amount of wide-eyed naivety to balance his growing flair for warrior adventuring. He’s good-looking without, perhaps, being ‘stunning” and he’s very engaging, perhaps more so than Danes — but then she’s got a lot of moaning to do, certainly at first. She does become less of a misery as the movie goes on.
The film looks good with some appealing mise en scène in places such as the witches’ mountain chateau, and the special effects are decent: they have that glossy deadness so common to computer-generated imagery, but the film isn’t a show-off about its effects, so that doesn’t matter. As for the plot, personally I could have done with a bit more ‘blistering pace”, but then the pay-off is character development. Overall Stardust makes a fine fantasy that will enthral imaginative kids without boring the grown-ups.