Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (August 17, 2007)

STARDUST? MORE LIKE FAIRYDUST!

So the Neil Gaiman fantasy mini-epic (epicette?) Stardust opened last week, and just to see what all this "gay pirate" hubbub was all about, I checked it out this week. While some people will no doubt be much more offended than I by Robert De Niro's performance as Captain Shakespeare, I actually found it to be rather amusing, and within the context of the film, not at all a negative inclusion.

*-*-SPOILERS HEREIN, MATEY!-*-*

Now, I don't know what the big deal was with Paramount in not wanting to tell us whether Captain Shakespeare was gay or not. As I wrote a few weeks back, you'd have thought I was asking for the recipe for Mrs. Dash or something when I asked, point-blank, "Is this character gay?" All I got was mumbling and "He's a cross-dressing pirate."

Well, he is gay, and he does cross-dress, but only in a very camp, "I'm really bored and have frilly dresses to dance around in when I have nothing to plunder and pillage" kind of way. And the gay bit is revealed long before the cross-dressing, so I'm not sure why it would be more sensitive a topic.

De Niro plays the captain of a flying pirate ship that harvests lightening. He's gruff and forceful around his crew, who obey him unconditionally. But behind closed doors, he basically turns into Coco, the gay houseboy that vanished after one episode of The Golden Girls. He minces, rolls his eyes a lot and looks like he's perpetually eating lemons ... but he also pulls off some of the movie's best lines and actually looks like he's having fun, which is a few and far-between occurrence for a Robert De Niro performance, if you think about it.

Shakespeare teaches hero Tristan to swordfight and heroine Yvain to dance and play the piano, gives them head-to-toe makeovers and takes care of them for a few days. He also explains to Tristan why he has to lead a double life: family expectations, fear of losing the respect of his crew, so on. Tristan wonders why he would go to such pains to impress people that he doesn't really want to be like (which serves as a parallel to his own story) and makes it clear that we're supposed to be rooting for Shakespeare to come out and live a happy and balanced life.

Later on, when the evil Prince Septimus comes to look for the kids, he finds Shakespeare dancing the can-can in makeup and a frilly undergarment-thingy, looking a bit like Little Britain's "ropey transvestite," Emily Howard (oddly, David Williams, who plays Emily, is also in Stardust as a dead prince). His crew charges in and saves Shakespeare from being killed, but he's mortified that they've seen his "hidden side". But the crew confesses that they've always known that he was gay and a drag aficionado, but they couldn't care less, because he's their captain and they respect him for all the things he does. It's actually quite a nice message, and one that for me overcame the slightly clumsy handling of the drag element and some of the limp-wristery that, while obviously meant to serve as a contrast to the gruff pirate front, was a bit much.

In the end we see a very happy and dapper Shakespeare with his crew at the big wedding, and the captain even winks at another dandyish fellow in the crowd, who winks back. So he's allowed to live comfortably without losing the respect of his crew and might even get some hot fop action? Sounds good to me.

The movie itself is a bit long and loses quite a few great moments from the novel (the whole gay pirate thing was totally invented for the film version), but overall it's not bad and has a nice, light sensibility to it that's appropriate for late-summer heat-dodging. Plus, there's a brief but very funny scene featuring out actor Rupert Everett (he does a fabulously arch pause like nobody can) and Sir Ian McKellen provides the narration, which itself sounds suspiciously queer at times. For example, here are the opening lines:

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gays at the stars, or do we gays at them because we are human? Pointless, really. "Do the stars gays back?"... Now, that's a question.

Dreadful grammar, but I think you get the point.