Old Yorker

  • Into the Woods

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rob Marshall (2014)

    Twenty-eight years after the first staging of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical reaches the big screen as a Walt Disney Pictures production.  Sondheim and Disney are strange bedfellows and it’s tempting to imagine negotiations between them, the studio reassuring the composer that his dark materials are in safe hands:  we’ve done loads of fairy tales, even made them scary!  James Lapine has written the screenplay for Into the Woods but various changes have been made to tone down the violent and sexual aspects of the theatre piece and the film was released in the US for the Christmas holiday – even though the result is still far from a family musical.  The CGI is surely not extraordinary enough to excite connoisseurs of special visual effects. The pyrotechnics are enough, however, to distract attention from Sondheim and Lapine’s deeper themes – parent-child relationships, growing up in order to accept responsibility and reality, moral complexity, the importance of storytelling, etc.  The cast list also has a bets-hedging look:  it includes an eclectic mix of big names that seems to have been assembled to appeal to different audiences.  Yet the studio’s commercial thinking has evidently paid off – less than a month after its release, the film’s box-office takings are already approaching three times its $50m budget.

    Into the Woods is well performed on the whole, especially on the distaff side.  What’s more, the characterisations – a skilful balance of stylisation and humanisation of fairytale personnel – are well orchestrated by Rob Marshall.  In other respects, his direction is fatally uncertain.  He seems to want the audience to be excited by what happens as if this were a conventional fantasy adventure story.  The integration of the various fairy stories is, in the first half, no more than perfunctory:  the woods are meant to be a unifying landscape but the characters don’t properly inhabit it.  (Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice describes this well:  ‘Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There’s little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one — it’s just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands’.)  There are moments when the film is stuck in a limbo between stage and screen, with the characters grouped like a theatre tableau and the fidgety camera trying to prove this is a movie.  The last third of Into the Woods corresponds to the stage musical’s Act II, entitled ‘Once Upon a Time … Later’, which deals with what happens beyond the happy-ever-after conclusion to Act I.   In Rob Marshall’s hands, this afterlife part is merely flabby and confused.  Cinderella, Red Riding Hood et al work uncertainly through character-forming experience to a glumly affirmative but still sentimental ending about finding yourself and doing well by your children.

    I have to admit to a deaf spot for most of Stephen Sondheim.  I realise that his music is sophisticated and his words are witty but the small, introverted melodies and the clever rhymes always feel like a marathon version of the improvised songs in Whose Line Is It Anyway?  Sondheim is revered for repeatedly taking the Broadway musical to new places, thematically as well as musically, and Into the Woods is regarded as one of these innovations.  It’s supposedly inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.  In this book, according to Wikipedia:

    ‘Bettelheim discusses the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales at one time considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose.’

    The Uses of Enchantment was published in 1976 but Bettelheim was hardly the first psychologist to venture onto the dark side of fairy tales, into the woods of their unconscious meanings:  Freud and Jung had been there long before.  Michael Schulman posted a piece in the New Yorker online last month, called ‘Why Into the Woods Matters’[1], in which he described the great apprehension felt by self-confessed diehard fans of the original Into the Woods like himself about the upcoming screen adaptation (and his ambivalence about the end product).  Schulman’s piece is amusing and insightful but it still didn’t help me to understand how Sondheim and Lapine’s play, although it may be a thematically radical musical, breaks new ground as a psychoanalysis of fairy tales.  And I think (I think) it’s more interesting to read about these ideas than to see them dramatised.

    Which leaves the performances (and the splendid costumes by Colleen Attwood) …  The plot centres round a baker, his wife and the witch whose curse has meant the couple are childless.  The Witch instructs them to obtain four objects which will allow the curse to be lifted.  She does so with a degree of self-interest:  she also wants to reverse the curse that turned her, a once beautiful woman, into a crone.   The baker and his wife’s quest brings them into contact with characters from Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel.  The Baker is played by James Corden, who does well enough with some of the comedy bits but lacks emotional depth in ‘Once Upon a Time … Later’.  It was a mistake to have the story also narrated by Corden in voiceover – his reading is bland.  Emily Blunt is excellent as the Baker’s Wife:  she has a rosy-cheeked beauty and wholesomeness but gives her lines a modern twist.  She gets the humour of the conception she’s playing but engagingly so – without seeming to make fun of it.  Her character’s death is muffled – it’s as if Rob Marshall, whatever the script says, is nervous to admit that someone in the story has actually died:  the same goes for the demise of Jack’s mother, played by a vigorously funny Tracey Ullman.  Meryl Streep’s involved interpretation of the Witch is very successful in the first half:  she’s a blend of traditional hag and exhaustingly eccentric old woman next door and her theatrical panache gives proceedings a lift.  The magical re-beautifying of the Witch is amusing enough but the new look and Streep’s characterisation don’t mesh so well in the second part and the Witch’s final exit is anti-climactic (the director’s fault rather than the performer’s).  Streep’s singing is very good, though, and the Witch’s neediness comes through strongly.

    Anna Kendrick also sings particularly well but, expert though she is in the role of Cinderella, her neurotic charisma seems to reflect the whole film’s location in a no man’s land between a movie for children and a movie for grown-ups.  Christine Baranski as Cinderella’s stepmother and Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch, as her daughters, are spot on and work beautifully together.  Whereas Lilla Crawford is a thoroughly eccentric Red Riding Hood, Daniel Huttlestone’s Jack is thoroughly conventional (and a very close relation to Huttlestone’s Gavroche in Les Misérables).  Somehow, however, these contrasting approaches jell – you don’t worry either about the mixture of English and American accents in the woods.  Johnny Depp makes a fine entrance as the Wolf but his human appearance then detracts from the impact of the grandmother-in-bed scene:  Rob Marshall appears simply not to have thought this through.  His most confident (and camp) staging is of a duet for the two handsome princes of the story, played by Chris Pine (Cinderella’s prince) and Billy Magnussen (Rapunzel’s) – but these are two more characters that fizzle in the second part.  Simon Russell Beale, Annette Crosbie and Frances de la Tour have cameos as, respectively, the Baker’s father, Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and a giantess.  Having a CGI-enlarged de la Tour in the last of these roles isn’t a bad joke but it looks, from what’s left of their performances, as if Russell Beale and Crosbie were wasting their time signing up for the film.

    13 January 2015

    [1] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-into-the-woods-matters

     

  • Into the Abyss:  A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Werner Herzog (2011)

    It’s hardly a modest title and Werner Herzog’s attitude to his subject verges on the Olympian.  Michael Perry and his friend Jason Burkett were accused of the murder of three people in Conroe, Texas in 2001 – Sandra Stotler, her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson.   They were tried separately:  Perry, who confessed to but then denied the crimes (claiming his confession was coerced by the police), received a death sentence for the killing of Sandra Stotler.  Burkett, who pleaded guilty to the murders of Adam Stotler and Richardson, was given life imprisonment.  In an early exchange with Perry in his cell on Death Row, Herzog informs him:  ‘I think you’ve been dealt a bad hand.  I don’t have to like you to conduct this interview.  But I respect you as a human being – I don’t think the state has the right to take your life’.   (Or words to that effect.)   Herzog’s tendentious, strong-arming interviewing style is in evidence from this documentary’s opening sequence, in which he talks with the Reverend Richard Lopez, the chaplain who’ll officiate at Perry’s execution and who clearly takes his responsibilities conscientiously and feelingly.   ‘Why does God allow capital punishment?’ demands Herzog.  Lopez, his voice breaking, says he doesn’t know but that he believes in a God who is just and good.  He might well have said the same if the question had been why does God let individuals, rather than the state, carry out murder but his lack of an easy, confident answer seems meant to confirm the case against capital punishment – this before Into the Abyss is five minutes old.

    Herzog has been quoted as saying that, although he opposes capital punishment, ‘this is not an issue film; it’s not an activist film against capital punishment … it has an issue, but it’s not the main purpose of the film’.  The closing dedication – to members of the Stotler and Richardson families and to the families of murder victims generally – might seem to confirm that yet the dedication comes across as little more than an official confirmation of Herzog’s high-mindedness.  The heavily accented English doesn’t help.  Herzog’s form of questioning is at worst almost a parody of a vee-have-vays-of-making-you-talk German interrogator.  (And we never see his face so the effect the voice is unmodified.)   At best, he’s like a stern professor who demands a reasoned articulacy from his students as a means of justifying their opinions.  Yet nearly every one of the people in the film is a compelling witness.  By the end of Into the Abyss, you have to admit that Herzog has either made brilliant choices and the interviewees are impressive in spite of him; or that there’s more to his interviewing technique than meets the ear and he really does bring people out.

    Herzog is right to imply that Michael Perry is a dislikeable personality.  It’s not just that he continues to deny the crime that put him on Death Row (he claims Burkett killed all three people although there’s no support for this in what anyone else says).  Perry’s professed Christian convictions give him an almost smug sense of martyrdom and he’s not expressive enough to suggest that this is a facade and he’s scared inside.  (The interviews with Perry were filmed just a few days before his execution on 1 July 2010.)   Perry is so unappealing that Herzog might almost be using him to test a liberal audience’s aversion to capital punishment but his effect on me was rather different.  Sandra Stotler was the first victim in the Conroe killings; the two young men came later.   To that extent, Perry was the prime mover in the destruction of lives that this film describes, including the lives of survivors, yet he becomes almost a minor character – in the sense that he’s less remarkable than the other interviewees and the feelings he stirs up are less complicated.   What’s depressing about Into the Abyss is the overwhelming impression you get of existences so variously blasted that ending these too might almost seem a mercy:  Lisa Stotler Balloun, whose mother and brother were killed by Perry and Burkett (and who suffered a terrible sequence of family bereavements even before the Conroe murders); Jeremy Richardson’s brother Charles; Jason Burkett’s father, who’s also in jail for life and talks painfully of the shame he feels about setting a lousy example to Jason.

    The chaplain Richard Lopez isn’t the only memorable Death Row ‘official’ to feature in Into the Abyss.  Towards the end of the film, Herzog interviews Captain Fred Allen, who oversaw executions in Huntsville (some forty miles from the prison in which those awaiting the death penalty are held, and where all Texas executions are carried out).   Allen supervised some 120 executions.  His attitude towards his job changed the first time he executed a woman.   He left the service (and lost his pension as a result).  Allen talks vividly about how he’s now ‘living my dash’ – the ‘dash’ being the mark between the two dates on a gravestone.  The implication is that his years in Huntsville were wasted ones because he was carrying out work that was morally indefensible.   Although Herzog may want us to see Allen as, in the director’s terms, simply a reformed character, he’s impressively complex.   The ‘tale of life’ in this film is extraordinary too.   Melyssa Thompson wrote letters to Jason Burkett and fell in love with him.   They’re now married and, with careful encouragement by Herzog to say more, Melyssa claims to be carrying Burkett’s child.  (The suggestion is that she was artifically inseminated after Burkett’s sperm had been smuggled out of the prison.)  The vivid Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who looks like Juliette Binoche, tells us that she thinks her husband is innocent (her theory is presumably that Perry did the lot) but, for the most part, she’s bright and aware.  She makes clear that she knows about, and what she thinks of, celebrity prisoner groupiedom before Herzog reminds her that Jason Burkett is ‘not an ugly man’.

    The interviews with Melyssa are a main feature of the last of the four chapters of Into the Abyss and Herzog entitles it, rather cheesily, ‘A Glimmer of Hope’.  The preceding chapter titles aren’t anything to write home about either – ‘The Crime’, ‘The Dark Side of Conroe’, ‘Time and Emptiness’.  Perry and Burkett shot Sandra Stotler in order to steal her red Chevrolet Camaro.  After disposing of her body in a different vehicle, they wanted the car again.  They lured Adam Stotler and Jeremy Richardson into nearby woods and shot them because they needed the access key to re-enter the gated Stotler home.   Herzog gives an odd emphasis to this shocking fact.  Questioning one of the policemen on the murder investigation about it, he says, ‘So two boys died simply because a gate was locked?’ – as if the fundamental problem here was installing a domestic security system rather than homicidal violence.  All in all, though, Into the Abyss is an imposing film – even if Herzog never gets into what’s surely one of the worst aspects of the capital punishment system in America:  the years that people spend on Death Row and the consequent impossibility of closure for the people bereaved by their crimes.  This must be the worst of both worlds for the condemned man (or woman), their families and the families of victims.  (There was a relatively very short interval – a few weeks – between the end of a capital trial and the date of execution when the death penalty was still in force in Britain.)

    Postscript

    Herzog shot a good deal more than interviews with Perry and Burkett and those linked to their crimes.  Over the last three weeks, Channel 4 has screened Death Row, his ‘portraits’ of condemned men.  Hank Skinner and the twosome George Rivas and Joseph Garcia, the subjects of the first and third films respectively, are in the same Texas prison where Herzog met Michael Perry.  James Barnes, the subject of the second film, is awaiting execution in Florida.   I missed the Skinner film but, once I knew I was going to see Into the Abyss, I recorded the other two and watched them today.    Each of the documentaries begins with statistics from Herzog:  thirty-four US states still have capital punishment; the form of death is now in every case ‘legal injection’ (until recently, Utah uniquely still allowed death by firing squad).  The films include the same opening shots from Into the Abyss of the gurney on which the prisoner will eventually be strapped for injection, of a counter on which Bibles in different languages are set out.  Mark DeGli Antoni’s sinister but melancholy score is again in evidence.  Herzog explains that ‘as a German, coming from a different historical tradition’, he opposes the death penalty.  This isn’t the best choice of words:  Herzog was born in Munich during the Nazi regime.

    The film about James Barnes is in some ways the polar opposite of Into the Abyss.   Barnes, who is still alive, is a complex and dominant presence in the film.  He received a life sentence for the murder of his wife.  Several years into his sentence, he converted to Islam and decided to admit to an earlier – and particularly appalling – murder of a woman.  In one of his interviews with Herzog, Barnes talks cryptically about other crimes and says that he’s thought a lot about confessing to these immediately before he dies.   Then he writes Herzog a letter, indicating that he’s prepared to say more about them now, which he duly does.   Herzog is pretty sure he’s being exploited – that Barnes is hoping that investigation of these other crimes will provide a stay of execution.   This involvement of the sternly objective Herzog is powerful in itself but Barnes’s intelligence has already made their conversations more gripping than those between Herzog and Perry.   Barnes not only expresses himself clearly but is very thoughtful.  When Herzog interrupts (as is his wont) to say, ‘You mean …’, Barnes more than once takes his time to explain what he really does mean.   Barnes’s twin sister Jeannice is an affecting witness.   When she gets out a photograph of them as young children, with their three siblings, it’s desperately sad; when she turns to a later photograph, also including the children’s parents, and explains what their father did to the young James when he misbehaved, your sense of James Barnes as a victim becomes so strong that it complicates your condemnation of what he grew up to do to others.   It’s hard to describe the confusion of emotions  in Barnes’s eyes when Herzog tells him that his crew have made contact with his long- estranged father – who has asked Herzog to pass on the message that ‘He loves you and hates the crimes you’ve committed’.

    As with Perry, Herzog tells Barnes at the outset that he doesn’t need to like him.  He doesn’t do that in the last Death Row film with either Joseph Garcia or George Rivas, both of whom have been sentenced to death for the killing of a Texas policeman during a robbery that went wrong, on Christmas Eve 2000, two weeks after they and the five other members of the ‘Texas Seven’ escaped from custody in the John B Connally Unit.  This jail break was thoroughly masterminded by Rivas, who was serving successive life sentences for (lone) armed robberies which didn’t result in homicide.  Garcia was doing life for the murder of another man.   While Rivas and others in the gang fired the shots that killed the policeman, it seems likely that Garcia did not; yet all six surviving members of the Seven were sentenced to death (the other man, Larry Harper, shot himself in a stand-off with the police before he could be arrested).   Herzog seems sympathetic towards Garcia, not only because of his lesser involvement in this death but because of the circumstances which led to the murder of which he’d previously been convicted.  As he asks Garcia to explain what happened to bring about this earlier killing, Herzog implies it stemmed from a minor incident that ‘could have happened to anyone’.   Once you hear Garcia’s account, you may think this is pushing it.  Herzog’s view of him as an unambiguous victim of the Texas legal system may be coloured by how uninteresting and helpless a character Garcia now seems to be.   That’s certainly not the case with George Rivas, who has a self-possession and a half-smiling professional pride about his career as an armed robber and as the intelligence behind the successful prison break.

    The four interviewees in this last film are the two men awaiting execution and the prosecution and defence attorneys at Garcia’s original murder trial.  The greater concentration on the details of the crimes and the absence of any backstory or relatives – either of the murderers or of their victims – combine to give the piece a smaller field of vision and a thinner texture than Into the Abyss or the portrait of James Barnes.  But, as with Barnes, it’s the way that a condemned man starts getting to Werner Herzog that takes the film in a new and fascinating direction.  From what he says early on here, Herzog started talking with Garcia after his interviews with Perry – I assume the exchanges with Rivas therefore came later still.  By the end of his conversations with Rivas, you feel that Herzog – who seemed to be urging greater articulacy from witnesses in Into the Abyss – has become angrily aware of how inappropriate and offensive it can be.   He keeps his temper but his antipathy towards the measured responses of George Rivas is palpable.  Garcia is still awaiting execution.  Rivas was lethally injected on 29 February 2012.

    3 April 2012

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