There are faithful movie adaptations, and then there are faithful movie adaptations. You know the ones, where complete sections of dialogue are slipped in verbatim? Sometimes they fail horribly but sometimes, like with The Princess Bride, it just works.
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A cult classic, The Princess Bride movie is one of those perennial favourites that never seems to age. (Except for that video game Fred Savage plays in the opening sequence, but that’s so brief it’s not even worth mentioning.) So when I found out that 2012 marked the movie’s 25th anniversary I was more than a little shocked. To celebrate, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now: I read the book.
It did not disappoint.
The biggest difference between the book and the movie is the frame. The movie has the grandfather reading S. Morgenstern’s novel The Princess Bride to his sick grandson, with various interjections from the two along the way. The book instead opens with author William Goldman talking about his own relation to “the Morgenstern”, as he calls the original fairytale, and his desperate attempt to track down a copy for his son’s 10th birthday. Upon finding out that the book his son tried to read is not the book he remembers his own father reading him when he was a child, Goldman sets out to make the “abridged” version you hold in your hands.
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And not only is it the abridged version of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride, but the “good parts” version. Goldman has cut out all of the “bad” parts, including 66 pages of Florinese history, 56 pages of Humperdinck courting another princess, and the 72 pages documenting Buttercup’s princess training. The excisions, and Goldman’s resulting notes are peppered throughout the novel, creating a secondary narrative thread.
This second thread in the book adds an element of fun to the book that the movie lacks — but the thing is, the movie doesn’t need it. Some of Goldman’s “editorial” notes show up as the comments made by the grandfather — which creates a nice continuity between the book and the novel — but I feel like having the secondary thread in the movie would have been too schizophrenic and unfocused for a feature film.
While the movie doesn’t provide room for the backstories of Inigo and Fezzik like the book does, I can’t really see anywhere for them to fit into the movie. In fact, there is so much the same between the book and the movie that it is very hard for me to pass judgment on either one. There are some slight differences in phrasing that I noticed (mostly because I’ve memorized the movie) but they’re minor and have no real effect on the experience other than to trigger my OCD.
Anything that has been omitted from the movie has been omitted simply for the sake of narrative pace and clarity, but nothing has been lost because of those cuts. At the core of it, the movie is the closest adaptation of the book possible and it captures the heart of the story: that fairytale of Princess Buttercup and her Westley. Which — despite its meta-fictive twists — is what the book is really all about.
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