Into the Woods
Rob Marshall
James Lapine (Musical: Stephen Sondheim & James Lapine)
PG for thematic elements, fantasy action and peril, and some suggestive material.
Anna Kendrick, Daniel Huttlestone, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Christina Baranski, Tammy Blanchard, Lucy Punch, Tracey Ullman, Lilla Crawford, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Billy Magnussen, Mackenzie Mauzy, Chris Pine, Frances de la Tour
125 min.
Even among those who consider Stephen Sondheim one of the greatest musical composers and lyricists in Broadway history, Into the Woods is considered a minor effort and if you were to take the adaptation Rob Marshall puts forth, you’d be quite justified in that impression.
Since the 1960’s, various artists have attempted to adapt Sondheim to the big screen. Many of those endeavors have been largely unsuccessful, including a trimmed down, unexciting A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum; a badly miscast, poorly constructed A Little Night Music; a vocally challenged, misrepresentative version of Sweeney Todd; and now a well sung, but meandering Into the Woods.
Saying that director Marshall’s vision is the best of this bunch of four isn’t saying a lot. Into the Woods while featuring some utterly spectacular performances from the likes of Anna Kendrick, James Corden and Emily Blunt, the set design is jumbled and unrealistic, some of the best numbers are entirely absent, and some actors seem entirely out of their depth.
The story about a childless baker and his wife who discover a malicious curse placed by a neighborly witch and must set out into the woods in hopes of finding the four ingredients that will help break the curse, restore the witch’s beauty and bring happiness ever after to all those involved. As the first act closes, everything indeed is happy, but the second act shows that happiness is fleeting and life has too many twists and turns to truly result in a fairy tale climax.
One thing we learned from productions like A Little Night Music is that trying to get big names to star can be a severe detriment. In that adaptation’s case, Elizabeth Taylor was entirely out of place. Here, the casting is a tad muddled with big names and small sharing the screen. While Emily Blunt may have built a name for herself, her stardom is not one that would draw audiences to the theater, the same can be said of her co-lead James Corden who, until recently, was barely known to U.S. audiences. Anna Kendrick has a following, but is far from a major name, and Billy Magnussen may only be familiar to general audience members who’ve watched a lot of daytime television or perhaps Boardwalk Empire. Magnussen gets too little to do to be effective while Blunt, Corden and Kendrick are the best of this film’s bunch of actors.
On the big name side, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp and Chris Pine take on three roles that cannot be farther apart in terms of screen time, but whose performances are all wildly uneven. In the case of Depp, his limited vocal chops are helped by his precise delivery of the song “Hello, Little Girl.” The song, toned down for the big screen and parent company Disney, still has an edge to it. The wolf is clearly a representation of a child predator, though his words treat her as nothing but a meaty snack. Depp does very well at bringing that undertone to bear, though his cheesy zoot suit get-up is distracting and his pimp hat with wolf ears is the most atrocious design in the entire film. In Pine’s case, the underwritten role of Cinderella’s Prince may play into his self-absorbed personality well, but his duet with Magnussen for “Agony” doesn’t fit in the least bit with the story, especially when the second act reprise is completely abandoned.
For Streep’s role as the ever-present witch, the voice of detestable reason, her musical delivery of “Stay With Me” is certainly a showstopper, but it’s in the early parts of the song that she struggles even if she does end on a strong note. Her rap-sing version of the garden rap in the prologue song “Into the Woods,” is an utter travesty. It has no punch, no bite and is lyrically stripped of its resonance. This seems more of a director’s choice than an actor’s choice, but for once Streep pales utterly in comparison to the role’s Broadway originator Bernadette Peters. Matter of fact, there’s nothing in the big screen version that holds a candle to Peters’ performance back in 1987, just like no one can compare to the indomitable Angela Lansbury in her original performance as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the entire film to its source material. However, if you don’t have that foundation, much of the dark humor, existential commentary and lyrical fervor is completely unidentifiable. The film fails to be more than a garden variety Disney fairy tale adaptation. While they have allowed some of the dark elements to remain, they are constantly diminished by Rob Marshall’s mismanagement of tone.
Marshall had tremendous success with his cinematic debut, Chicago, but his follow-up musical outing, Nine, was a jumbled mess. Into the Woods is much better constructed than Nine was, but Marshall still doesn’t quite understand how to mount an effective adaptation. Into the Woods has terrific moments, but they are connected by sinewy claptrap and mismanaged tone. It’s an uneven, cobbled together mess.
One of the struggles of big screen musicals is taking it off the stage so that it feels alive. Marshall brought in Dennis Gassner and Anna Pinnock to layout the design of the production. Their choice, influenced by Marshall’s desires, to make the woods feel claustrophobic, but also entirely unrealistic, kept the audience from feeling as if they were transported into a real fairy tale world where happiness isn’t always forever after. Keeping a fantastical edge is a grand idea when you’re focused on kid-friendly narratives, but Into the Woods really is not and should have been given the opportunity to excel in the visual landscape on the scale of something like The Lord of the Rings or even the very kid-friendly, but realistically darker Harry Potter films.
Into the Woods is a success if you completely ignore the foundation on which it was built. The original stage production, as limited as it’s accused of being by its detractors, is still a vibrant, exciting world that challenges our conceptions of fairy tale history and skillfully blends numerous stories into a cohesive whole. The idea that the woods are a metaphorical testing ground representing life’s realistic expectations and tribulations is almost entirely absent from the production and while it may be engaging to some, the film is most certainly not fair to its many supporters who saw something deeper and more honest in the source material, much of which was subverted and undermined in the big screen adaptation.
There’s not much to discuss here, but anyone who’s familiar with Disney’s deceitful simplifying of fairy tales should not be at all surprised that Cinderella, who dies in the stage version is preserved in the film, running off to live happily ever after while everyone else around her gets varying degrees of misery and happiness. That desperate attempt to avoid harming their own characters only continues to tarnish their reputation as a company unconcerned with getting things right and only wanting to try to appeal to broader audiences even when their efforts wouldn’t have impacted their bottom lines in the least.
Review Written
April 7, 2015
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