Into the Woods
It’s not hard to make Stephen Sondheim’s stage musicals look cinematic. Sondheim is a movie fan, and shows such as Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods are expressionistic in ways that play to the strengths of visually oriented filmmakers. What has been seemingly impossible is for directors such as Sweeney Todd‘s Tim Burton and Into the Woods‘ Rob Marshall to tinker with Sondheim’s intricately constructed scores without throwing off the tone and the meaning. As with Sweeney Todd, Marshall’s big-screen Into the Woods is mostly serviceable. But even the uninitiated should be able to sense that something is lacking.
Into the Woods brings together Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Prince Charming (Chris Pine), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), the beanstalk-climbing Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel’s witchy mother (Meryl Streep), a baker (James Corden), and the baker’s childless wife (Emily Blunt). Just as in Sondheim and writer James Lapine’s musical, the movie sends all these characters on Grimmsian quests that seem to end happily. But then there’s a second act, with deeper perils and greater dissatisfactions.
In the Broadway version, Act 1 is fleet and funny, full of bouncy tunes such as “It Takes Two” and the title number. Act 2 is darker and more mature, with a pair of tearjerkers in “Children Will Listen” and “No One Is Alone.” Marshall’s movie and his strong cast nail the sorrow, but the humor is too distant, other than the over-the-top princely lament “Agony” (which goes without the funny second-act reprise).
Into The Woods‘ themes survive: the simultaneous thirst for and fear of adventure, and the desire to be somewhere safely in between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” Marshall also gets terrific performances from Streep, Blunt and Kendrick. Stretches of the film work thrillingly, especially when the characters sing around one another. But Marshall cuts a song here and a scene there, and all those small subtractions finally add up to a distracting void, until the movie plays more like a tribute to Into the Woods than like the real thing.
