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