Into the Woods might very well be Stephen Sondheim’s most beloved, or at least most accessible, musical, and the notion of an eventual film version was in the works pretty much from its opening night on Broadway in 1987. With a winning score and a delightful book that combined some of the Grimm Brothers’ most famous fairy tales, Into the Woods served as inspiration for countless television shows and movies (everything Dreamworks Animation has done), but the prospects of it ever becoming a film seemed less probable as the years passed and talks of actors and directors attached to it, gave way to just that, talks. The issue with Into the Woods is that despite its use of fairy tale characters and charming melodies, it’s actually a very dark show, at least too dark to be turned into a viable commercial film that would satisfy parents and their children.
The premise seems rather simple, there’s a a Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) who wish to have a child, but first have to revert a Witch’s (Meryl Streep) terrible curse. To do so, they must go into the woods and find “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold”, items that belong in other tales. The cow belongs to Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) a naive young boy who trades it for “magic beans”, the cape is owned by Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) a precocious preteen who meets a suave Wolf (Johnny Depp) on her way to her grandmother’s house. The yellow hair is Rapunzel’s (Mackenzie Mauzy) who the Witch kidnapped as a baby and has kept in a doorless tower, and the gold slipper belongs to Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) who dreams of attending the Prince’s (Chris Pine) ball.
Structured like a mythical quest, Into the Woods, is fascinating because it doesn’t end when the characters achieve their “happily ever after”s, instead it chooses to show the consequences of their fulfilled wishes. At first glance it appears to be just a tale about parents and children, and how their failure to communicate with each other marks their destiny. In the Witch for example, Sondheim comments on the nature of how all parents seem despicable to their children, who feel trapped by their overprotective nature. It’s no accident that the Witch becomes beautiful (“her “true self” as she calls it) only when Rapunzel is old enough to leave her and go have children of her own. When she finally sees her adoptive mother for who she was, it’s she who will most likely become a monster to someone else.
With such ominous undertones, it’s no wonder that studios and producers were never able to reach a compromise between making a good movie that didn’t pander to audiences or reduced Sondheim’s themes to inspirational, self-help quips. Working from a screenplay by James Lapine (who won a Tony for Best Book of a Musical for the Broadway production) director Rob Marshall has come up with a version that’s respectful to Sondheim and might also very well be his most mature directorial effort to date.
Without the excuse of cutting away to capture the thrills of big choreographic set pieces, Marshall has no choice but to direct Dion Beebe’s camera to the performances of the actors who are singing to each other, as opposed to entertaining an audience. For a tale as meta about storytelling as Into the Woods, it’s remarkable to see how it avoids falling into the trap of cynical self-awareness, when the Baker’s wife sings “what am I doing here? I’m in the wrong story”, it has more to do with her own self-concept, than it does with our notion of being told a story. It helps too, that Blunt is so effortlessly warm in the part, that we’re never able to look at her just like a fairy tale character or an archetype, but like an actual being.
If anything else, the film adaptation of Into the Woods proves to be quite an exercise in Hollywood restraint, despite its notable cast and having Walt Disney Studios behind it, the film feels rather small. Marshall and company forgo moments that could have made the film insufferable and adjust to a rather low-key theatrical experience. For example we never see the inside of the Prince’s castle and can only visualize the grandeur of the festival through Cinderella’s account (yet another nod to the power of storytelling), similarly when Jack sings “Giants in the Sky”, the mise-en-scene is limited to have the boy climb a tree, which is more than enough to convey the vertigo of the experience, without having unnecessary CGI reenactments. It’s quite rare for a mainstream film to involve its audience to the point where our imaginations are doing half the job.
In general the film gets more right than wrong, the only complaint would be the abrupt change between the first and second “acts” which feels too rushed, but this is something that comes from the show and would be rather difficult to convey on film without an intermission. The actors’ work often helps viewers become more immersed into this fantastical world with fears and desires just like ours, Kendrick’s expressive eyes and picaresque smirk for instance, evoking the shallow dilemmas of young women who realize there is much more to life than shoes and balls, or Crawford’s deliciously crass deliveries which capture the awkwardness of being trapped between being an adult and a child. Corden and Pine are also terrific, but it’s Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s Prince who steals every scene he’s in.
If Meryl Streep’s Witch owns the film, it’s not only because of the importance Sondheim gives to the character, but because the actress brings a sense of warmth to the part that has been missing in her recent, more technical-focused work. This is the Streep of She-Devil unafraid to make fun of herself, combined with the Streep of Silkwood who can be sensual and earthy, without renouncing the strength she wishes to project. Streep infuses the part with little flourishes that help her touch on various issues like rape and how women are often made to feel responsible for what happened to them, also the injustice with which women are assigned specific roles they have trouble getting rid of, and the notion that a mature woman too should feel sexy and proud of her features.
While Sondheim purists will undoubtedly have a bone or two to pick with the film, Into the Woods is the rare Hollywood entertainment that ought to become a classic because it has the ability to see beyond the whims of the current times and the season. It’s a film that’s worthy of being revisited, because it undoubtedly will get richer as we age along with it.
