Highlights from a “Princess Bride” Virtual Live Read

Still from The Princess Bride.
Wallace Shawn, Robin Wright, and André the Giant in “The Princess Bride.” The film is a pastiche, a comic reconfiguration of the clichés of swords and sorcery.Photograph from 20th Century Fox / Everett

“The Princess Bride,” being somehow foundational to Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z culture, is, for what seems like an overwhelming majority of people, never really far from mind. So, perhaps, it was inevitable, in this restless, screen-centric time, that someone would have the very good sense to orchestrate a virtual cast reunion. On Sunday night, from the relative safety of their individual homes, in who knows where, actors from the 1987 film came together via Webcam for a live-streamed reading of the script. (The event was a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; to gain access to the broadcast, attendees had to donate at least one dollar to the political organization. I donated twenty-seven dollars.) Like so many events these days, the three-hour broadcast was a cavalcade of accidentally muted microphones, glitchy video, and other technical difficulties. It’s been thirty-three years since the film’s release, and several key members of the cast—Peter Falk, Peter Cook, Mel Smith—have died. For the occasion, their roles were filled by other celebrities, including, as Fezzik, a forcefully earnest Josh Gad, doing his dogged best at the late André the Giant’s slow-motion French accent.

Even without the assistance of period costumes, fake swamps, or Mark Knopfler’s swoopingly romantic score, the core cast members recaptured much of the weird, over-the-top magic of the film. Hairlines have receded since the eighties, and faces have wrinkled (to a point—it’s Hollywood, after all), but Cary Elwes was still a suave and wisecracking skewer of Douglas Fairbanks; Wallace Shawn still a flawlessly spluttering megalomaniac; Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest still smarmily evil; Billy Crystal an ideal fast-talking hedge wizard; and Carol Kane exquisite as his righteously shrieking wife. There were some pleasing updates: Crystal ad-libbed a mention of Cel-Ray soda into his famous appreciation of M.L.T.s; Elwes, when Westley is asked why he wears a mask, delivered his response—“They’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future”—with a disposable surgical mask over his nose and mouth. One downside of the stripped-down affair was how starkly it revealed that Princess Buttercup, the film’s only significant female role, does little more than be silently beautiful. Still, Robin Wright committed fully to that emptiness, calling in for her mostly silent role from a computer near a window, in a spare, cream-appointed room somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone, where the slowly lowering evening sun cast shadows across the extraordinary planes of her face.

The last time I rewatched “The Princess Bride,” it became obvious to me that its core narrative is not the romance between Buttercup and Westley but the revenge quest of Inigo Montoya. The film is a pastiche, a comic reconfiguration of the clichés of swords and sorcery (it’s based on William Goldman’s novel of the same name, from 1973, which twists the knife of satire even more viciously); consequently, it is almost a matter of necessity that the plot is nonsensical and the characters one note: the princess is beautiful, the hero is dashing, the villains are evil. In Mandy Patinkin’s care, however, Montoya stands out—the character has a depth and intensity that seems imported from another movie entirely. When, at last, he finds the man who murdered his father in front of him, his single-minded dedication to revenge propels him to triumph. The film ends with its heroes, Buttercup and Westley, sharing a passionate kiss, but it’s the scene just before that which really brings the plot to a close: “I have been in the revenge business so long. Now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,” Montoya says to Westley, just before they jump out a window, to ride off on snow-white horses in the direction of happily ever after.

Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Josh Gad, and Mandy Patinkin during the virtual table read.

Patinkin, who is sixty-seven, has become something of a social-media celebrity in recent months, thanks to videos in which he and his wife of forty years, the actress and writer Kathryn Grody, putter around their warmly cluttered home, bickering and flirting and singing, often in response to prompts given, off-camera, by their son Gideon, who shoots and posts the videos. Patinkin has evolved from his early years as a tortured heartthrob into, now, a fascinating blend of tortured heartthrob and futzy Jewish grandpa, and the clips are preposterously charming. He deletes old e-mails! He talks through a recipe for tuna burgers! He and Grody munch on buttered matzo while guessing what “dabbing” is and trying to define the word “meme”! Many of his recent posts have urged viewers to support the Biden-Harris ticket (notably, a song-and-dance routine with the Patinkin family’s yellow Labrador, Becky), and for the “Princess” fund-raiser he threw himself into his old role with a passion that seemed to sear the lens of his Webcam. He roared, he wept, he danced; he rolled his “R”s and sharpened his “E”s; he even came in costume—a white shirt, rakishly unbuttoned to mid-chest. At the moment of the story’s first marvellous duel, when Montoya introduces his sword, Patinkin presented—to considerable excitement in my household (and on Twitter, where my feed was briefly overwhelmed by exclamation marks and the word “sword”)—an actual prop sword from the film itself.

After the table read, there was a Q. & A. with the cast, plus Rob Reiner, the director, and Norman Lear, who produced the movie. The comedian Patton Oswalt m.c.’d, directing to this or that celebrity questions submitted earlier by the audience. (Asked about the possibility of a sequel, Reiner pooh-poohed the idea, but mentioned that he’d always thought “The Princess Bride” would make for a great Broadway musical. Lear, who is ninety-eight years old, added that, because it takes about eight years for a musical to get off the ground, he plans to live to be a hundred and six.) At one point, Oswalt asked Patinkin who had been the most “interesting or unexpected” person to quote Inigo Montoya. “I would have to say Senator Ted Cruz,” Patinkin replied. The Texas senator, a Republican and Trump apologist, often cites his love for “The Princess Bride”; he recently tweeted his dismay at the Democratic fund-raiser, with a somewhat labored riff on one of Patinkin’s character’s lines. Unfortunately for Cruz, his tweet led to a surge of publicity for Sunday’s event, which drew an audience of more than a hundred thousand connected devices—and secured, therefore, more than a hundred thousand donations for the Biden-Harris campaign’s operations in the battleground state.