Film Review: Into The Woods (dir. Marshall, 2014)

  

Special effects-strewn, literal-minded, occasionally baffling, Rob Marshall’s take on Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods can’t be said to herald the arrival of a great new movie musical. It’s easy to see the appeal to Disney of this 1986 show, which – in its mash-up of various Grimm stories – jibes nicely with the current vogue for cinematic revisions of fairy-tales. Yet, as with Maleficent (2014) et al., the end results don’t quite add up to the sum of several appealing parts here.

  

Ardent Sondheimites will doubtless be eager to pin the movie’s shortcomings on Disneyfication. That may be true up to a point, but I’d argue that the film merely highlights the problems inherent in the original Sondheim material: the bittiness of the structure, the sometimes inelegantly-integrated narrative strands, the sentimental lurches, and – let’s face it – a score that offers as much in the way of teeth-grinding jauntiness as it does exquisite beauty. It also accentuates some weirdly conservative underpinnings, making the piece look more reactionary than revisionist for the most part. A female character is killed off immediately after indulging in a brief transgression. Cinderella, ultimately, just wants to go back to sweeping the floor. The “alternative” moral lessons offered - “witches can be right, giants can be good, no-one is alone” – aren’t precisely profound. (A question: has anyone asked of this musical - as so many seemed to ask of Samuel Adamson and Tori Amos's vastly superior The Light Princess - "But who is this show for?")

  

The shakiness of Marshall’s direction (some scenes are execrably staged, especially those involving multiple characters at the mid-point of the movie) means that the film never inspires much confidence, and its tone wobbles all over the place. The manic cutting in the opening sequence attempts to bring the disparate strands together in a cinematic way. But still the characters’ clunky entrances and exits, and the jarring reporting of off-screen deaths, make the piece feel helplessly stage-bound, and the film never consistently achieves the fluidity to make it really fly.

  

That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t manage some high spots, especially in its more intimate moments. “Agony”, with Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen’s Princes ripping open their shirts in masochistic glee, is wittily done. Emily Blunt comes through with a fine, delicately shaded performance as the Baker’s Wife, and she and James Corden (as the Baker) duet delightfully on “It Takes Two,” one of the (too few) moments that genuinely does justice to the notion of the woods as a site of transformation for the characters. (Without Blunt to bounce off, Corden is bland.)

  

As in The Iron Lady (2011) Meryl Streep as the Witch again looks like she's just stepped out of Hocus Pocus (1993). But she brings great emotion to her reading of “Stay With Me”, and once more demonstrates her gift for really acting her way through the songs, even when getting (literally) overwhelmed by the staging on “Last Midnight.” None of the vocals make you cower in your seat the way the shrill Broadway OCR can but some of the performers (Johnny Depp as the Wolf; Annette Crosbie as Little Red Riding Hood's Grandmother; Simon Russell Beale as the Baker's Father) register so weakly that they might just as well have saved their energies. A mixed bag, to say the least.

  

Film Review: Begin Again (Carney, 2013)

John Carney's Begin Again offers more winsome (if tediously foul-mouthed) music-based uplift in the mould of the director’s overpraised Once, though decidedly glossier and with the dubious added bonus of Keira Knightley grimacing and gurning away in one of the lead roles. Knightley plays—or, in her usual manner, has a game go at playing—Greta, an English girl in New York who gets dumped by her musician boyfriend (Adam Levine, of Maroon 5, in a creditable film debut) and finds herself dragged along to an open mic night where she’s talent spotted by Dan (Mark Ruffalo) a down-on-his-luck music exec who hearspotential in her fey folky warblings. The film follows the pair as they collaborate on an album, its tracks recorded live in different locations in the city.

Carney can be insightful on music biz machinations and these aspects provide some of the more interesting elements of the picture. But Begin Again (which was called Can A Song Save Your Life? when I saw it at TIFF last year, and I’m not sure how much of an improvement the new title can be considered) is ultimately too transparent in its feel-good designs upon the audience and too clumpy in its plotting. It’s the kind of movie in which everything is on the surface, every emotional beat underlined and made obvious. Greta starts meddling in Dan’s personal life just so the pair can have a little spat but ultimately the movie is all about relationships getting repaired—lives being saved, indeed—by the healing power of song. That could work, were the featured tracks, written by the formerly-witty Gregg Alexander, not such bland affairs (just as they were in Once)—folk-influenced pop full of would-be poetic musings, and as forgettable as the film’s title. In addition, for all the wittering about artistic integrity and “authenticity” that goes on here, the movie itself feels mighty inauthentic: when the characters are in a tight spot, for example, they simply call on a beneficent multi-millionaire hip-hop star (Cee-Lo Green) to help them out.

 

Catherine Keener and Hailie Steinfeld go to waste as Ruffalo’s estranged wife and kid, but Ruffalo himself brings some rumpled charisma to his role and James Corden does some pleasantly relaxed funny-buddy schtick as Greta’s busker pal. The movie is undistinguished, and I found it resistible (much more so than the superficially crummier Walking on Sunshine; see below). But it probably pushes enough buttons to turn itself into a hit.