Director: Rob Marshall

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Meryl Streep & Emily Blunt

Running Time: 125 mins

Release date: 25 Dec, 2014

Worldwide Gross: $58,770,278

 

 

Basic Plot:

 

Stephen Sondheim, master composer of stage musicals such as A Little Night Music (1973) and Sweeney Todd (1979), won a Tony Award for best original score in 1987 for "Into the Woods".  The show also won best book, written by James Lapine, long-time collaborator of Sondheim.  The story combines many familiar fairy tales of the famed Grimm Brothers including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk.  The great thing about the musical is that it weaves these stories together in such an imaginative way that it seems they must have always been connected.  It’s hard to imagine, after watching Into the Woods, that the man who bought Jack’s cow with some magic beans wasn’t the son of a man whose family had been cursed by the witch who imprisoned Rapunzel in a lonely tower.  The stories just fit.

 

The film tells the same story: a baker and his wife cannot conceive a child, so they make a deal with a witch who assigns them the task of tracking down four items with which she will make a potion, thereby breaking the curse that she herself placed upon them.  The items are these: a robe as red as blood, a cow as white as milk, shoes as pure as gold, and hair as yellow as corn.  It’s easy to see where this is going, if one is paying attention.  Songs with complex melodies in classic Sondheim style take the audience from setting to setting as the baker and his wife proceed to badger the other characters for the things they need.  There is comedy, drama, romance, adventure, and excitement.  But, unfortunately, in this version, there are also some yawns.

 

Clock Watching? (14/20)

 

It’s no fault of Sondheim’s that this movie is a little bland - his songs are wondrous.  It’s the in-between moments in which the spoken exposition takes place that really bring the film’s momentum to a hault.  I was in a state of rapture anytime anyone was singing (even Chris Pine with his British Bill Shatner impression), but the Broadway Musical is a broad and not at all subtle art form.  Musical film dramas such as Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, 1971) can take long breaks between songs and allow for scenes of subtlety and restraint because the subject matter at hand is so delicate and complex and the audience needs to be gently taken through the narrative arc.  But Into the Woods is, at its core, a comedy.  Chicago works so well as a musical comedy because the dialogue ticks on with the rat-a-tat rhythm of a swinging high hat, so even when the characters aren’t singing melodies, it still seems melodic.  In Woods, every time a character started talking, I started shifting in my seat.  There’s just no sense of forward motion and the songs seem to stand alone disparately like music videos. 

 

Disney may have been the wrong film company to make this movie, though.  There are nine songs from the original Broadway play that didn’t make it into the film, and Stephen Sondheim himself wrote two original songs for the film that didn’t make the final cut!  Time is, of course, a limitation.  It’s almost unheard of these days for a film to have an intermission, but this film would have been much more enjoyable as a whole with half the talking and twice as much singing.  But many of the songs and story lines that were cut for the film were far too risqué and violent for a Disney audience.  The Grimm brothers had a knack for the grizzly and twisted, and didn’t shy away from themes like adultery and pedophilia, so obviously Disney had to censor Sondheim here in order to not warp and traumatize their Frozen-obsessed Disney Princess fan girls.  So why not go with Miramax, the production company behind Chicago, which was chock full of sex and violence and was endlessly entertaining?  I suppose since a few of the most famously Disney-fied princesses are stars here, it seems only natural that Disney would make this movie.  Normally, I would say that one should be able to disregard the source material and that a film should stand on it’s own.  I’ve never seen a stage production of Into the Woods.  I saw the film Chicago long before I had a chance to see the stage play, and I loved it having nothing to compare it too.  So I don’t think it’s unfair to say that while I can’t and would never say that the stage play of Woods is “better” than Rob Marshall’s film, I will say that I definitely felt the absence of the gritty and adult-themed nature of Sondheim’s original, and that made it difficult for me to sit through at times.  I didn’t know what it was at the time, I just knew that something was missing.

 

Oscar Performances? (19/20)

 

While the scenes of dialogue drag and almost derail the film, the performances here are incredible.  Anna Kendrick as Cinderella perfectly captures the classic princess’s innocence, virtue and dependence on woodland creatures for help in times of need.  Christine Baranski, Tammy Blanchard, and Judy Punch are deliciously lascivious as Evil Stepmother and Stepsisters.  Emily Blunt is great as the baker’s wife - conflicted, stubborn, and a little desperate.  Chris Pine is hilarious and intentionally hammy, mocking the shallow nature of the hollowed out Prince Charming in almost every fairy tale.  And then, of course, there’s Meryl-Freaking-Streep.  It’s impossible to talk about a Streep performance without slipping into the usual clichés, so here they are:

 

She brings a perfect balance of grace and gravitas to her performance, she simultaneously embodies earthy humility and unstoppable star power, and she immediately elevates every scene she’s in and all the other actors seem to be rising to the occasion inspired by her chops and pure cinematic presence.  Here she plays a witch, and while her storyline infuriatingly goes nowhere, she is by far the most fun to watch and one of the few witches I’ve liked more than the people she was bewitching.  A slight disappointment was Johnny Depp as the Big Bad Wolf.  The trailer concealed everything about his character except his wolfish hands, creating mystique and intrigue.  But, when he actually appears on screen, it’s basically Captain Jack in dead-guy makeup and half of a wolf mascot costume.  He’s still good, though, but much like Streep, he disappears too abruptly. 

 

The greatest part about all the performances, and I mean all, is that everyone can sing!  From the young children to the tertiary characters, everyone really carries their own weight when it comes to vocal performance.  The stand out for me was Emily Blunt.  While I probably don’t anticipate that she’ll be taking over the powerhouse role of Elphaba in "Wicked" on Broadway, I was surprised at her ability to not only carry a tune, but to really perform the songs in a natural way.  Her character is given the most heavy lifting, story wise, and she delivers.

 

Lights, Camera, Direction? (15/20)

 

Rob Marshall showed great promise as a director of film adaptations of successful and darkly tantalizing stage musicals when his Chicago won best picture at the 2002 Oscars.  However, his musical follow-up Nine in 2009 fell a little flat due to a lack of show stopping performances that Chicago had from Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger.  While the performances in Into the Woods are the best aspect of the picture, as a whole, this film is not the work of a great musical director.  The film looks great, though.  The sets were real, constructed on giant sound stages, so it gives a sense of really being lost in the woods.  I was grateful for the lack of CGI and green screen effects that other fantasy directors like Burton and Cameron seem all too eager to rely on. 

 

Tell a Friend? (10/20)

 

I would tell only the most hard-core Sondheim fans or budding musical geeks to check this movie out.  It’s absolutely worth watching for the vocal performances and production design, but I would hesitate to recommend it to the average moviegoer.  I saw this one with my fellow Broadway lover friend, my mom, and my sister.  My Broadway friend loved it, I was mixed, my mom was kind of bored, and my sister hated it.  That seems like a pretty wide-ranging sample of audience reactions to the same film, so I would use discretion in my recommendations.

 

Again? (10/20)

 

I would not rewatch the original theatrical version of Into the Woods.  I would, however, listen to the soundtrack, watch a condensed songs-only version, or a probably non-existent extended version with those 11 missing numbers and the original gruesome endings to the various fairy tales put back in.  But as it stands, I don’t see myself going into the woods with Rob Marshall again. 

 

Total: 68%

 

By Kenny Meier