#WhatThomWatched Glance*:
Into the Woods
(Rob Marshall, 2014; In theaters/Disc release announced for 24 March 2015, Disney Studios)
Recommended for: Those enamored (or potentially enamored) of Sondheim (but not so enamored that a neutered version of one of his greatest works will bother them) . . . .
Fairy tale deconstruction has probably been around as long as the fairy tales themselves. The Washington Post just reviewed new fairy tale books which include the first two entries in a Princeton reprint series called “Oddly Modern Fairy Tales” originally published in the 1920’s and 30’s; these are two of many examples of post-modern takes on the Mother Goose versions from the 1700’s, and they’re coming on a hundred years old themselves. After Disney did The Three Little Pigs mostly straight in 1933 (winning the animated short Oscar and adding “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” to the lexicon), Warners responded with parody versions: 1943’s Pigs in a Polka, 1953’s The Three Little Pups, 1957’s The Three Little Bops and so on; the trend continued through Jay Ward and Bill Scott (television’s Fractured Fairy Tales), writers like William Steig (Shrek) or Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man), and even Disney parodying themselves (in 2007’s Enchanted). These examples are all more or less satirical of the form.
When Sondheim and his collaborator James Levine created Into the Woods in 1986, they were going for something more than parody or pastiche. When they weave the storylines and material from several fairy tales together, they are honoring the form. They take domestic and childhood themes — family, both finding and losing it; children obeying or disobeying or breaking away; what “happy ever after” would actually imply — and express them for adults, in a sophisticated way. There’s certainly ironic humor — for example, as the narrator matter-of-factly describes the birds which peck Cinderella’s mean stepsisters’ eyes out — but the events are as serious and consequential as anything in Andrew Lang's Fairy Book versions. The result was a celebrated musical which has won awards in several productions.
As a movie translation, Marshall's Into the Woods is solid (but: see below). The cast is uniformly excellent; the sets (with exteriors filmed in England, naturally) are tactile and gorgeous; and as pointed out elsewhere (I noticed it first in Jesse Hassenger’s A.V. Club review) Sondheim's fluid lines force the takes to flow in-camera for long strokes, with none of the staccato cutting that plagues other recent movie musicals (most relevantly, Marshall’s own Nine and Chicago).
Reminds me of:
I’m a Sondheim fan and I have been fortunate enough to see some of his masterworks in excellent productions — I caught Assassins in Indianapolis in 1993 which (if my memory serves me) was one of the early regional productions in which Sondheim introduced “Something Just Broke”; and Sunday in the Park with George at the Goodman Theater in 1987, where we were proud to consider that we were watching the show mere yards from the actual Seurat "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" hanging at the Art Institute of Chicago — but I’ve never seen Woods performed. Compromised or not (whoops; spoilers; again, see below), the music is wonderful and the old “You leave the theater with no tunes you can hum” complaint about modern composition is belied by the fact that I caught myself belting out “Into the woods!”, compulsively, days later. (Uh, not that I had much follow-up.)
But then, the guilt!
So, finally, here’s the rub — and the issue which has had Woods fans up a tree about this screen adaptation: A thespian friend of mine, one who was in a production of Into the Woods, has clued me into the differences between the original musical and the movie, starting with the fact that the character he played on stage was cut completely. I had already told him that I loved the music and was generally impressed with the book — but that a few second-act unresolved storylines had bothered me; without any hints from him, I had zeroed in on some of the missing dark bits (live characters that should have been dead, dead ones that should have been . . . . less pleasantly dead). The original show’s parts all lock together as a Sondheim show’s parts will do — meaning that sunny, whimsical themes from a first act are repeated as tragedy in the second; here, we have most of the setup and not quite all of the punchline. The stage version also benefits from a Narrator character who engages the audience more directly (as an actor on stage tends to do), and who transitions into an important figure in the stories proper; this entire interplay vanishes from the film. And while a large-screen, literal image can be gorgeous, there are many ways in which a live staging, dependent on innuendo and unseen things, is more visceral: paradoxically, the Disney version suffers where it shows (even a hint) of, say, a giantess (which could only be imagined on stage), and suffers again when it whitewashes the second-act fates of some characters by failing to show their true ends on screen.
On top of that, the most cursory investigation into the original creation and production of the show makes it clear that it was very much a reaction to its time — specifically, to the AIDS crisis which was at its peak in 1986 when the show opened. Actors in early productions were doubled between the first and second act in roles that connected and commented on each other; for example, the Wolf (whose part is over early in the show) comes back as Cinderella’s Prince, drawing a comparison between the beast's and the man’s treatment of women. Child characters (Little Red Riding Hood, Jack) who are played by age-appropriate child actors in the movie were played by adults in most productions, freeing the show to explore much more explicit themes of carnality and sexual threat. This doesn’t mean that a whole-family Disneyfied version of the same material is worthless, but it’s certainly constrained.
And while I’m piling on . . . . Yes, I loved every line of (retained) music and thought the actors did an honorable job — and yet by the end I had to admit to myself that the overall two hours were . . . not particularly exciting. It’s partially my temperament: I’m not terribly interested in seeing “movie stars” take on Broadway roles. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret is still my gold standard for a modern (i.e. post Rodgers-and-Hammerstein) movie adaptation of a stage musical — which largely works, of course, because the songs are naturalistically placed within the context of the stage-within-the-movie, just as songs are placed within performance contexts in his later All That Jazz.
Pitch:
Maybe I'm just still attuned to bratty little girls after #WTW 8's Alice, but I was particularly taken by Lilla Crawford's Little Red Riding Hood and her song I Know Things Now. (Viewing this with the AIDS crisis context in mind renders it that much more effective.)
*For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.
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