The Princess Bride Review

The trick is the tone, and it is a genuinely difficult one to hold. Goldman's script is constantly aware of the conventions it is using, announcing the kissing parts and interrupting itself with a grandfather and a sick boy, and yet it plays the romance and the revenge completely straight, so the jokes never corrode the feeling. Mandy Patinkin gives the film its heart with a line he repeats until it stops being funny and becomes a wound. Wallace Shawn, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and a magnificently gentle André the Giant each get a single mode and never break it.

Cary Elwes is doing Errol Flynn with a raised eyebrow, and Robin Wright is asked to be beautiful and sad and manages a good deal more than that. The visual side is the weak part, a modest budget showing in the fire swamp and some flat television lighting, and the framing device interrupts the momentum more than once. None of it matters. The writing is dense with lines that work out of context and better in it, and the sword fight is choreographed to be watched rather than cut around.