Stardust

Review

Several hours after I emerged from the documentary The 11th Hour, in which Leonardo DiCaprio solemnly explains how humankind is doomed if our species doesn’t work with instead of against nature, Brooklyn was hit by its first tornado since 1889. The next day, I watched Max von Sydow—a week after the death of Ingmar Bergman—fail to hold his own against Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 3, then get gunned down by a French taxi driver who had just discovered his inner American cowboy. An hour later, I gazed on Robert De Niro—under the direction of Madonna’s husband’s best man—as a closeted pirate captain prancing to the “Can-Can” in a tutu. I haven’t checked the Rapture Index, but surely this is a cosmic convergence. The end might well be nigh.

Portents of apocalypse aside, I had a good time at Madonna’s husband’s best man’s film, Stardust, a romantic fantasy loosely based on a novel by Neil Gaiman (i.e., they paid him a lot of money, none of which he should spend on a ticket). It’s puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others. As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful—yet his gung-ho spirit wins him Brownie points. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a withered wicked witch who transforms herself into Michelle Pfeiffer and at least one critic into a slobbering cretin: When the camera revolves around her as she changes and ends on her “new” face, she’s so stunningly, mythically gorgeous that the fairy-tale universe becomes real. The magic of cheekbones. Pfeiffer plays the same stereotypical shrew as in Hairspray, but this time her slow burns have great punch lines: With exquisite annoyance she flings out an arm and turns a goat into a man, a laddie into a lassie, and a rival into a flaming torso. Give the lady her due: When the script calls for witchy cackles, she does not cackle witchily halfway.

The Pirates of the Caribbean people would have stretched this material out to eight-plus hours, while a visionary genius like Terry Gilliam would have royally screwed it up by putting more emphasis on the scenic wheels and pulleys than the narrative. The model here, luckily, is The Princess Bride with a dollop of The Black Adder—and, to cut the facetiousness, nonstop rhapsodic heavenly choirs. After about five prologues, a star falls from the sky into a walled magic kingdom nestled somewhere in the English countryside west of C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe, and the young shop clerk Tristan (Charlie Cox) goes off to get it; he wants to impress the featherbrained rich girl (Sienna Miller) he loves. I’ve left out key details, but the big thing is that even though the star makes a stadium-size crater, it turns out to be the size of Claire Danes. In fact, it is Claire Danes.

Having to embody a star could, in theory, put an end to one’s stardom, but Danes is one of the few actresses who can bring off guilelessness. Accepting her—and not rolling our eyes when she smiles and the white light radiates from her being—is a kind of pact we make with the filmmakers. It made me feel rather noble—and resent Tristan when he ties her up to take back to his girlfriend. (“Nothing says ‘romance’ like the gift of a kidnapped injured woman!” Danes exclaims.)

Director Matthew Vaughn’s first film was the violent, self-congratulatory thriller Layer Cake, and Stardust has a fair amount of grue for a storybook romance. (It’s a little off-putting when one of the villains skewers the comic relief.) But some of the best gags are the nastiest, like the family of princes who murder one another for the crown but stick around as crabby ghosts—their throats still cut, faces smashed, etc. Ricky Gervais pops up as a scheming but buffoonish black marketeer; his haggles with De Niro and Pfeiffer are polished vaudeville bits that—unlike a lot of his self-humiliating shticks—go on just long enough. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (8/20/07)