Buttercup

A kindly person on my Dreamwidth FL referred readers to this post about Buttercup in The Princess Bride. Mostly the movie, but also the book. She lacks inner character, that's basically the problem.

I think the writer is on to something here. I noticed two things about Buttercup in the movie that bothered me from the first time I saw it:

1) The movie, unlike the book, offers no explanation for why Buttercup gave in and agreed to marry Humperdinck. All she gets is denounced for it. That seemed to me the one big plot hole in the movie.

2) Buttercup was played by Robin Wright. It was close to her first movie, certainly the first time I ever saw her. I didn't like her. She was the only actor in the movie I didn't like. Everybody else I thought was terrific. Cary Elwes, whom I'd also never seen before, was better than I could possibly have imagined. But not Robin Wright.

I figured at the time that she was just not a very good actor. But I've liked her in everything else I've subsequently seen her in. (What really sold me on her was not so much Forrest Gump, an annoying movie, as two obscure but terrific films, Toys with Robin Williams and The Pledge with Jack Nicholson.) Either she got a lot better as an actor, or else the part was so badly-written that a good actor couldn't do anything with it.

The former is possible, but I now think the latter is more likely. Buttercup is a cipher. She gets to order Westley around and utter a few defiant lines that - as the post points out - come out of nowhere, but otherwise she's mostly just hauled around and reacts to things. What can Wright do with this?

I've become more aware of how screenwriters and directors who don't comprehend the characters in their movies can kill the actors' performances since the Lord of the Rings movies came out. The only good performance in that mess is Sean Bean as Boromir, because Boromir is the only character in the story that Peter Jackson understands. We know from other movies that Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen can be good actors, so why are they so lifeless and inert in these movies? Because their parts are badly written and badly directed. Just like Buttercup.