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Toying with not one but two layers of source materials, Into the Woods arrives in filmic form after decades of trying. Its moniker and content spring from the famed stage musical, as created by Stephen Sondheim in 1986, staged on Broadway, in West End and around the world since, and accompanied by a book for the show by James Lapine. Its interweaved fairy tales spring from stories ascribed to the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and others.
So it is that Cinderella (Anna Kendrick, Happy Christmas), Red Riding Hood (newcomer Lilla Crawford), and Jack (Daniel Huttlestone, Les Misérables) wander into the titular woods, each on a modest quest of multiple motivations: going to a ball to escape ill treatment, evading a predator while visiting a relative, and selling a cow to avoid poverty. Their paths cross with a baker (James Corden, Begin Again) and his wife (Emily Blunt, Edge of Tomorrow), the kindly pair caught in a web woven by a witch (Meryl Streep, The Giver) while attempting to achieve their own dream of having a child.
Into the Woods expects its audience to know where its narrative is heading, as tunes rather than talk drive events involving a wicked stepmother (Christine Baranski, TV’s The Good Wife) and equally cruel siblings (Blue Jasmine’s Tammy Blanchard and Stand Up Guys’ Lucy Punch), a charming prince (Chris Pine, Horrible Bosses 2), a villainous wolf (Johnny Depp, Transcendence), and an insistent mother (Tracey Ullman, State of the Union), as well as a long-haired maiden (Mackenzie Mauzy, Forever) trapped in a tower, and her royal would-be saviour (Billy Magnussen, The East). That’s the film’s entire first act, even when focusing on the exploits of characters derived solely from the musical and devoid of any other past. Then the second half kicks in, a significant tonal shift signalling the delving beyond the apparent happily ever after.
Adapting an adaptation made from a mash-up of myth-like creations is by no means an easy endeavour, as director Rob Marshall (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) and returning writer Lapine discover. Their task is loaded with dual opportunities to deviate from known narratives and familiar tellings of such tales, with the results unsurprisingly inconstant. In transitioning from the stage to the cinema, simplifications reign, retaining the witty spirit of satire and the on-point examination of archetypes, but absent the full thrust of subversiveness. In reshaping the original stories themselves and recounting them through song, the focus shifts from childhood entertainment to ruminations on the reality of adulthood, a clever concept best realised in the feature’s comic leanings and a smattering of ballads, though left wanting elsewhere.
Marshall has found mixed fortunes in making movie musicals, his Chicago lauded, his Nine deplored, and Into the Woods sharing elements of both. Once more, recognisable performers line up for variable portrayals, with Pine hamming it up as the feature’s clear scene-stealer, and Corden, Kendrick and Blunt all excellent in more subtle turns – but the less said about Streep and Depp’s misfiring pantomime-style parts, the better. Again, the helmer’s handling of the songs traverses the energetic, as in the extended opening number, and the sometimes flat. Another repeat comes from his aesthetic choices, suitably dark in look and claustrophobic in atmosphere, yet unimaginative in their obvious theatricality, and in the badly framed and paced procession of shots that results.
Perhaps it is apt that for all the feature’s engaging enchantments, messiness ensues, and that its sheen of singing and stars only barely conceals the bumps underneath; accepting the bad with the good – and embracing actuality over the idealised – is the movie’s main message, after all. In a cinema landscape littered with gritty revisionist takes on traditional material, it also feels both refreshing and fitting that Into the Woods favours emotion over action in its belted-out treatise on wish fulfilment, an approach that may ebb and flow in its interpretation of the film’s inspirations, but one that isn’t without its charms.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Into the Woods
Director: Rob Marshall
USA, 2014, 125 mins
Release date: January 8
Distributor: Disney
Rated: PG
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