They say you can only walk halfway into the woods, because afterwards you’re only walking out again. Some could argue that there’s a pretty nifty parallel there with the Broadway musical Into the Woods, which rather famously has a familiar and glorious first half, and a strange and dark conclusion. Go in with a skip in your step, go out with a bit of a down feeling that would be best served with a cup of hot cocoa and a security blanket.
That bi-polar attitude has now permeated the big screen with Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods, a production that’s full of wonderful performances but which trips up over the story’s two-act structure. Into the Woods cuts a lot of the second-half of the play out altogether whilst remaining rigorously faithful to the first, also – sadly – to a fault.
The gist of Into the Woods, a sprawling storyline if ever a musical had one, is that all of the major fairy tales – including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk – take place in the same woods at the same time. A hapless Baker and Baker’s Wife (yes, that’s her name) must collect famous artifacts from each of these fairy tales in order to lift the curse placed upon their family by a wicked (or perhaps not so wicked) witch.
Everything works out more or less as you expect it to in the first half of Into the Woods, but the most interesting developments come along in the second, as the heroes discover that “happily ever after” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the beloved characters wind up in places you wouldn’t ordinarily expect. It is in this half, not the most popular, that the whole point of the story is finally laid bare. The power of storytelling becomes relevant and pointed and a little bit weepy.
And although it makes sense that Rob Marshall would have to cut something out of the play in order to reach a reasonable running time (because honestly, Into the Woods lasts forever on Broadway), some of the choices are baffling. Major characters disappear as Into the Woods enters its dark passages, never to be seen again. So the film feels inescapably incomplete, lacking perhaps not the best parts of the musical but certainly some of the vital conclusions that bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.
Meanwhile, the first half is more or less intact, even the parts that seem creepier than ever. The Wolf, played here by Johnny Depp, was always a total creeper, singing about the deliciousness of little girls while essentially seducing Little Red Riding Hood, but usually she’s played by someone who looks like they’ve already hit puberty. Watching young Lilla Crawford, an exceptional performer and dynamite singer, sing about her sexual excitement in The Wolf’s belly is… uncomfortable, and probably a little bit more so than it needed to be.
Most of the cast of Into the Woods is bringing something special to the proceedings. Anna Kendrick is at her beltiest as Cinderella, James Corden is sensitive and endearing as The Baker, Meryl Streep is Meryl Streep as The Witch (so obviously that part’s fine), and Emily Blunt is absolutely radiant as The Baker’s Wife, injecting even more humor into the role than usual.
But somehow it’s Chris Pine who shines the brightest, not because he’s the best singer or actor in the group (heavens no), but because he demonstrates a canny charisma and self-effacing wit that we’ve never seen from him before. As Cinderella’s Prince he’s doing a spot-on young William Shatner impersonation, all manners and mannered and unnecessary shirtless. (Where was this in either of those Star Trek movies?) He’s the ultimate fairy tale ideal, taken just far enough to evoke just how absurd that ideal always was in the first place.
Meanwhile, Rob Marshall is staging Into the Woods with his usual grimness, creating a serious environment for all of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s wonderful satire to play against. And it does Into the Woods a disservice, draining some of the actors’ vitality out through their surroundings and getting a little too high on how dreary the finale can be. There’s wit to the songs, there’s wit to the performances, and yet there’s no wit to how anything here presents itself. Into the Woods is a kitten purring on a pile of human bones.
All this is to say that Into the Woods is even more of a mixed experience than usual. Great performances in a mostly uninteresting production, arms tied around the entire film’s back by songs that explain key elements of the plot without actually showing them. Such an approach was necessary on the stage – because you try cutting to an entire land of giants in a theatre sometime (go ahead, try it, I dare you) – but the decision not to show any of this in a motion picture, even under the lyrics, basically defeats the purpose of making a motion picture adaptation in the first place.
So here we are: Into the Woods is finally a movie, and it’s… just okay. Bravo to the actors, polite applause for the director, and two tickets to the stage production, please, because it’s so, so much better.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
