Review of Into the Woods (2014) by Rob S — 11 Aug 2016

INTO THEE WOODS.

Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Lilla Crawford, James Cordon, Daniel Huttllestone, Christine Baranski, Tracy Ulman, Johnny Depp.

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

Original book, direction and screenplay by James Lapine.

Directed by Rob Marshall.

9.5/10.

(THIS IS MY LONGEST REVIEW TO DATE, I UNDERSTAND THAT THIS MAY BE TOO MUCH TO READ BUT GIVE IT A GO. AT 2, 323 WORDS IT'S A LABOUR OF LOVE. I WENT TO SEE THIS FILM ON DECEMBER 26th AND AM JUST POSTING IT NOW. I'VE SPENT THAT LONG ON IT.).

The music of Stephen Sondheim has often been described as calculated and cold. Mathematical in precision but not anything you leave the theatre humming. That being said, "Into The Woods" and the music and lyrics of Sondheim (Sweeny Todd/Sunday In The Park With George/Company) tend to be my favourite out of all of the composers both living and dead.

This film was destined to be a flop for a number of reasons. First off, when you are a lover of the original stage play with the great love and admiration: Bernadette Peters, Johanna Gleeson, Robert Westenberg, Kim Crosby, you tend to be a bit possessive of the original cast and vision and so any movie would fall short. Also, it was a production that, when you watch you look at it and think how the hell are they going to be able to film this? It's a convoluted piece that has lyrical music and staging that intercedes with other moments.

Also, how can you beat Bernadette Peters, or the Tony award winning performance of Johanna Gleeson? You can't, right?

Cinderella (Kendrick), Jack (from the beanstalk, played by Huttllestone), and Little Red Riding Hood (Crawford) all live in the same village. They are residing, side by side and quietly living in a fairy tale community that probably doesn't have Neighbourhood Watch, because if they did, there's no way the Witch (Streep) could be next door without some kind of restraining order.

We all know the fairy tales...they've been told for hundreds of years and through multiple telling, this is just one.

Cinderella is as familiar to audiences as Santa Claus, she's been portrayed by actresses of all shapes, sizes and colours. Apple of father's eye, turned into Scullery maid with a Cruella De Ville step Mother and two scraggy step-sisters who treat her like dust bin-kin. She is the lowest of the low. Little Red, finding the wolf and becoming dinner along with Granny. Jack and his deserted mother who treats him like she probably did his father. We have these stories that have become cautionary tales.

Well the endings are turned upside down and thrown amongst the rocks and you find that there really is a happy ever after but it comes at a price.

The Baker and Wife want a child. Desperately and it's the Witch that can cure the curse she put on the family house. You see, the Baker's father slipped over the fence to the Witch's garden and stole vegetables to appease his pregnant wife. Well, there was a curse because the Father stole some magic beans. The Witch gets the child born. Hint, it's not the Baker but his long-lost sister.

Magic beans, Jack, get it?

The Witch needs four magic ingredients ; A cow as white as milk. The cape as red a blood. The hair as yellow as corn (cue Rapunzel), and the slipper as pure as gold. If you have read the original Cinderella and not the Disney version, her slippers were not of glass; but gold.

The Baker (Cordon) and his Wife (Blunt) must traverse the woods to find all of these ingredients.

The real point of this tale is how one's actions have repercussions to an entire community. It's quite relevant for the time and place and it's 24 years old. This is a tale about how when you wish for something, you must be careful because you really want, because you might just get it.

"I wish.

More than anything.

More than life.

More than the moon.

When you start with that kind of hyperbole, you have great expectations.

This wasn't supposed to work; at all. It was going to be a failure because it was a live show that was impossible to replicate because it was so intricate, so defined, so impossible.

The real hero here is not a single performance (though they were flawless) but the director, Rob Marshall.

He made the impossible the possible; though I wonder why I'd think that when he transformed "Chicago" into another classic film from an impossible Broadway show. He turned the very first line of "Memoirs of a Geisha", when read was so visually specific, that the visual shot lives up to your image, become alive and not just words on a page. This really is his speciality.

Taking multiple characters from different locations all the while singing in the same song is a very tough thing to do. It's not like the older musicals where there was usually one song and then dialogue which was usually easy to film. The intricacy that Marshall took with maintaining the integrity of the original source material and refreshing it for an audience 27 years from the Broadway debut is nothing short of brilliant.

This film is kind of like the Musical version of Sex and the City. It's a very heavily female influenced piece and the men seem to be accessories, like a Gucci purse or a Cartier necklace, they are there more to just give the Women a story to tell.

Part of Marshall's genius was finding the right cast for the right role. Kendrick as Cinderella is a revelation. She grabs the internal struggle of the character. That kitchen wench that her father left with her Step Mother (Baranski) and step sisters who longs for a better life to the young maiden running away from a prince to the final consequence of becoming the Princess. "My father's house was a nightmare, your house was a dream. Now I want something in between." It's that ambivalence that makes Kendrick's Cinderella so endearing to the audience. Kendrick does a stellar job. Her voice is perfect for the role and, while not a surprise that her singing could pass the mustard, it's her acting chops that really helps define the role.

There was a moment when all of my trepidation for Little Red Riding Hood came to an end, and that's when Lilla Crawford opened her mouth. Danielle Ferland played "Red" on Broadway and was spectacular. Crawford not only does the role justice but Ferland's interpretation as well. I'm unsure if she saw the original actress's portrayal but it seemed almost an homage to her. The fact that she was very young was a bit uncomfortable during the "Wolf" scene, as the story of Red is one of pedophilia. There was just this creepy moment between Crawford and the Wolf (Depp) in "Hello Little Girl". I'll get into the reasons later.

Meryl Streep is one of the most accomplished Actor's, not only of her time, this time, but for all time. She will go down for at least the next 200 years as the finest of the lot. She certainly is the most acclaimed. I believe she is the most nominated actor for any award and you can see why. Though she hasn't had much success in musicals before - anyone remember "Mama Mia"? Here she rises and shines brightly as the "Witch from next door". Her voice is velvet in "Stay With Me", where she laments the desperation of a mother to her daughter, Rapunzel, who wants to wander off and see the world. Streep is a professional beyond professionals so to see her portrayal as the Witch, desperate for a cure for her hideousness, is fun, dark, sad and wonderful. And she's already been nominated for a Golden Globe.

Also nominated for a Golden Globe is Emily Blunt (The Baker's Wife). Blunt is good, very good. Her shoes, no pun intended, are a bigger challenge to fill than possibly anyone else's as the actress who did it on Broadway, Johanna Gleeson, won a Tony and was just absolutely wonderful in the role. It's the hardest of the female roles, I think. First off, she doesn't even have a name. She is thrust into the curse that belongs to her husband, not of her own doing, and her life is irrevocably changed because of it. She is bent and determined to help her husband find the cure to their inability to have children. She is smart, sarcastic, witty and desperate. Blunt plays the part with subtlety that is perfect for film. She plays off well with Kendrick and holds her own against Streep. She carries Cordon (The Baker) and raises his performance to match her own.

In terms of the male performances I found that Chris Pine (Cinderella's Prince) was delightful. When he started out I was a bit nervous because his singing didn't seem to be on par with that of his Prince brother, (Rapunzel's Prince - played beautifully by Billy Magnussen) but when they broke into "Agony", I saw where Marshall was going with it and it was pure gold. From that moment on, Pine won me over and I found him to be the perfect choice for the part. In the second act of the film, he sweeps Blunt's Baker's Wife off her feet for a quick rendezvous in the woods. In order to bed her, with all of her proselytizing that they are both married, he oily sings things like, "Right and wrong don't matter in the woods. Only feelings.".

James Cordon as The Baker was passable. I felt he was mostly there to make Blunt look good but he had some moments. To be brutally honest, this was the role that I was supposed to play and I was completely jealous. I've studied this role inside and out, watching, reading and singing intention and there were so many minutes he missed. In fact, one of the songs that were cut were one of his and I was curious if it was because he just wasn't up to the challenge. Of course, in fairness, it could have been a choice by Marshall. He did have one tender moment when he encountered the ghost of his Father in the Woods. Cordon wasn't going to win on this one with me. Yes, I'm biased. But having poured over the text for the last 21 years, I've come to know the Baker.

Jack is tough role. There is a huge song that is difficult to sing (Giants in the Sky) that to have an actual child sing it was impressive. Daniel Huttlestone was probably the logical choice as he'd done the live performance in the film adaptation of "Les Misèrables" as Gavroche and he did that very well. But his strong accent pulled me out of the performance and he didn't seem to be able to handle the weight of the role. But, again, it's hard so I give him kudos for even attempting. I think Marshall just went easy on it. He had done a film before so, just call him up. I would have scoured for the perfect Jack but I don't know what the Director's intentions were.

I finally come to the "and Starring" part.

Johnny Depp as the Wolf. It didn't work. At all. In fact, it seems that the orchestration of the song, "Hello Little Girl" seemed to be the only one that changed its style - and to be changed to suit Depp. Again, this is speculation on my part but having a man dressed in a Zoot suit with ears sticking out the hat just seemed to be a very weak, lazy choice. It also really creeped out the audience.

"Grandmother first then miss plump....what a delectable couple: Utter perfection - one brittle, one supple -.

Think of those crisp, aging bones, then something fresh on the palate, think of that scrumptious carnality twice in one day!".

Having a human play the part works on Broadway because there's no way that they could do the magic of cinema but even on Broadway the actor, Robert Westenberg, looked like an actual Wolf! Having Depp do it as a human type animal just made it weaker.

The other thing that bothered me is that, while Depp was marvelous as Benjamin Barker in Tim Burton/Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeny Todd" , that's how he played the part of the wolf. It was just an offshoot of Sweeny which did NOT work for the wolf at all. While their intentions were exactly the same, Depp's whisper/singing lost the character.

While we vilify George Lucas for Jar Jar Binks we can also thank him for making CGI characters so believable in the cinematic universe. The Wolf could have been a fantastical creature if made computer generated and with a voice that wasn't influenced by a completely different character.

That was the one thing about the film was the weakest. It was a "Star grab" on Marshall's part and I felt it wounded the piece.

One of the complaints that some have for this work is all the "talk singing" parts. A conventional musical has dialogue then a song to punctuate that piece of text. It's heightened by song to make a point. A lot of "Into The Woods" are dialogue put into a song to move the story along. Sondheim does this with ease as he always has. It can, however, leave the audience who aren't prepared for this type of musical, cold and distant to the narrative.

I found the film a refreshing return to the original, and yet lusciously its own being.

"Into The Woods" is one of the greatest film adaptations of an impossible musical and if the Academy understood that, Rob Marshall would be walking home with the best director award.