Practically from birth, we’re taught by fairy tales that as
long as we’re pure of heart (and determined enough) that there will come a day
when all our wishes will come true; everybody gets their happy ending. Though
experience tells us that is anything but the case, we like to comfort ourselves
with these tales — so much so that over time even the stories themselves have
gotten sanitized, their darker edges wiped away with a little fairy dust. “Into
the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s
beloved musical (and one of my personal favorites) casts a critical eye toward
these stories, examining what other lessons might be gleaned from the stories
we’re told at night before the lights go out. Just as classic fairy tales are
used to impart life lessons, “Into the Woods” has its morals as well, but the
lessons it tells are that nothing is as simple as good versus evil, and
“happily ever after” is not really a solution.
The musical fits in with the current resurgence of
revisionist fairy tales, combining the characters of familiar Brothers Grimm
stories: Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford),
Jack and the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), and
Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy), with an original story
about a Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily
Blunt, the movie’s true MVP, along with Chris Pine as Cinderella’s Prince), who
both long to have a child. As the story of the Baker and his Wife begins, they
learn that the reason they haven’t had a child is because of a curse placed
upon their home by the Witch (Meryl Streep) next door. In order to get the
witch to lift the curse, they must give her four specific items: a cow as white
as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure
as gold. And so they venture into the woods in search of the items, crossing
paths with the rest of the characters, each in the midst of their own stories.
The first half of the musical sticks fairly close to the
storylines we know, and by the end of the first act the good people get
everything they desire, the bad ones get what they deserve. But where things
get really interesting is in the show’s decidedly darker second half, which
follows the characters after their stories’ traditional ending, as they
discover that “happily ever after” comes with its own set of problems. This
shift in tone has always been divisive, but this twisty second act is one of
the reasons I love the musical so much. As everything becomes more muddled and
unclear, the characters wade through murky moral questions, forced to deal with
the consequences of their actions and the decisions they’ve made in pursuit of
their goals.
“Into the Woods” is pure Sondheim; its complex themes are
married to melodies as gnarled and twisty as its woodsy setting, and director
Rob Marshall deserves credit for getting it to the screen intact. But
throughout, Marshall demonstrates a frustrating lack of visual creativity that
detracts severely from the things he gets right. Several musical numbers are
clumsily staged, and despite opening up the setting, the film often feels as
claustrophobic as if it were still contained to a stage. It’s difficult not to
wonder what a little movie magic from a more visually inventive director might
have done for the material.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2014.
