Have you heard the one about the kid named Jack who has to sell his pet cow, only to trade it for some beans? How about the little girl in a red hooded shrug that's off to visit her grandmother? Or maybe the servant girl who sneaks out to a Prince's ball, or the girl with the impossibly long hair that people use to visit her atop a doorless tower?
They're all here in "Into the Woods," Stephen Sondheim's cheeky mash-up of childhood fables; he takes the tone from the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop, and twists it like the gnarled trees that serve as the setting for much of the production.
So, it's a musical? I hate musicals.
Yeah, not only that, but most of Sondheim's musicals are the equivalent of restaurant critic food. They're the molecular gastronomy of musicals, almost meta. They're musicals for people who want their lyrics meaty and almost incomprehensible the first time around. They want wit that often only comes from acclimation or repeated viewings. This is dense stuff, so don't let the idiom of children's literature fool you -- Sondheim is once again trying to weave complex magic for the theatrical stage.
I lied. I love musicals, especially this one.
Well, you'll probably like this film then, maybe even more than I did. I don't mind some of Sondheim, finding the likes of "Sweeny Todd" a lot of fun, but I'm a sucker for tunes that are catchy, with a certain lyrical sophistication. I'd take fluffy but terrific "Hairspray" over "Sunday in the Park With George" any day, even if the deliriously talented Mandy Patinkin is giving his all. With this one we don't have anyone of Patinkian proportions, we do get to hear the stylings of Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp and, in one of the film's showstopping numbers, Chris Pine.
That's a lot of people.
Tell me about it. And while not all of them "make it" all the way through the film, most of the darker elements from the stage play remain intact, including the pedophilic proclivities of a certain Mr. Wolf. There's a darkness haunting these woods, and it's that very nature that Sondheim's sing-song soliloquies try to sort out.
So it kind of works?
I think it's fair to say that director Rob Marshall does a perfectly adequate job at telling this story, employing talented and charismatic actors to tell the tale. Any issues I have are really with the source material. With any musical you have to buy in, not just suspend your disbelief; you have to agree to go along for the ride. The issue with "Into The Woods" is that the beginning part is tedious as it literally plays out in archetypal ways, while the ending feels needlessly sombre and despondent.
I get what Sondheim's trying to do, but I do so more on an intellectual basis rather than an emotional one. It's one of those head nod, "Yeah, I see where you're going" things, not something to be either swept up in or emotionally devastated by. This makes the big, stage-y numbers seem more by-the-numbers than they should, as if we're being prevented from truly investing in what's going on with these disparate characters.
Still, some think this is one of the best musicals of the last half-century, and for them I hope they enjoy this presentation. There's some moments that do lift the stage show up to theatrical proportions, and other moments that are appropriately claustrophobic. Even the kid actors, especially Lilla Crawford as Little Red Riding Hood, hold their own against their well established co-stars.
So, it was worth the wait?
Well, this film's been in development for almost two decades, back to when it was going to have Robin Williams and Goldie Hawn as central cast members. Even Jim Henson's company was involved, which would have made for an even more surreal vision for the forest.
As a theatrical version of the musical, I think it's fair to say that Marshall's film does exactly what it needs to, allowing the tunes to speak for themselves without too much in the way of florid camera movements or awkward staging. This may be the version of this musical that fans want, but it's still not a work that's inviting for those not already caught under its spell, and for those not predisposed to like this show it's hard to see that the film will sway them to take multiple journeys "Into The Woods"
"Into the Woods" opens in theatres on Christmas Day.
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