Into The Woods

If your idea of a musical is catchy tunes, snappy choreography, colourful  costumes and vibrant art direction, something for instance like director Rob Marshall’s 2002 film, Chicago, then you can forget Into the Woods.

Even acknowledging that I have no appetite for Stephen Sondheim’s to-me mysteriously popular musical style and that, apparently a good few "family-friendly" changes were made to the original Broadway production (I struggle to imagine what family would sit through the result however), it is impossible to deny that the songs are tuneless, there is no choreography to speak of and hte film's overall look tends to the murky with an over-reliance on CGI for visual effects. The idea of interweaving a handful of classic Brothers Grimm fairytales into a single narrative is initially intriguing but progressively becomes less appealing as it unfolds with so little verve.

The fairytales, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel, are interwoven with an original story by James Lapine (who also did the screenplay),about a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) unable to have a child because their home has been cursed by a witch (Meryl Streep) who agrees to lift the spell if they bring her a golden slipper, a red cloak, a white cow and a lock of yellow hair.  

Whilst Corden and Blunt work together well in this first part of the film, the characters from the individual stories remain largely isolated from each other and the result, particulalry given that we are so familiar with them, is somewhat tedious in the telling, only relieved in places by a cameo from Johnny Depp as The Wolf and a parody number “Agony” in which Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen try to out-do each other in relating their unrequited love, the only number in which Marshall actually attempts some expressive staging.  Streep, needless to say, has no problem playing The Witch but Anna Kendrick is ill-suited to the part of Cinderella and her voice grates. By the time the second half of the film arrives, bringing with it a female giant and real world issues for the troupe. who now are all in the same boat, so to speak, one is frankly over it.

Not having seen the original stage musical I cannot say how much of the blame for this lies with Marshall-Lapine and how much with Sondheim-Lapine but I'm willing to apportion it 50-50 to each. Sondheim-lovers will no doubt demur but then there's no accounting for some people is there?

 

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