I realize my opinion of this is not going to make me a lot of musical theater friends, but… I’m not going to give a whole-hearted condemnation of the Into the Woods movie adaptation, so, y’know… hot takes ahead.
I went on record in my Sweeney Todd review that Sondheim is not my favorite, and that Sweeney is an anomaly in my general opinion of his work. I usually find his musicals wordy, repetitive, and exhausting to listen to after a while. I’m not saying he’s untalented, cause clearly he is insanely successful and respected, but his style is not for me. If it’s not seven minutes of cannibal puns, I’ll pass.
I wasn’t even planning on exposing myself to the show before watching the movie because I had absolutely no interest. Unfortunately, Sideways recently released a video breaking down the musical motifs in the show, and mentioned there was a stark contrast between the original production and the movie. In fact, it was upsetting shadow of its predecessor, and missed the entire moral point of the musical. He referenced another video by Snugboy who made the case the adaptation was a failure, and I thought, great, I need to watch the show because now I need context. This sounds like a translation disaster, and after suffering through Disney’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, there was already blood in the water. My plan was to watch the show, then the movie, write up something, and then watch the Snugboy video and revel in how much we both hated the film. The 1987 recording of the show with queen Bernadette Peters is on Hoopla, so one night I sat down and watched it.
The original show is like 3 hours long, and it *feels* that long. There are a billion characters, and they crash into each other like golf balls in a dryer, minutely inching the plot forward and backwards until it finally crawls to a resolution at the end of the first act. Except not, because the second act, where the actual moral message is delivered, is another hour and a half of the show. For all that is going on, I will give it credit, the plot was fairly easy to follow (for the most part, a few notable exceptions I’ll mention below) and every character’s motivations were clearly outlined. But Jesus Christ, it’s the embodiment of chaotic neutral, and by the end I was fully checked out. I’m not going to rehash the plot here, but if you want a good summary of the show, please watch the Sideways video. His content is excellent and I will forever link it, even if sometimes I disagree with his overall opinions.
The next morning, I woke up nursing my Sondheim hangover, wondering if I could procrastinate watching this movie for another few months. Instead, I decided to be brave and regrettably renewed by D+ subscription so I could check out the movie adaptation. I’m already not a fan of the show, and the movie is supposed to be a thousand times worse, so I’m in for a world full of hurt, right?
I thought the movie was totally adequate. I’m even going to stick my neck out there and say they cut a lot of the fat of the original and better illustrated a lot of the conflict than the show did :dodges incoming tomatoes: I’m not saying it’s a movie I would ever willingly watch again, and that there aren’t things that were baffling and fucking uncomfortable, I’m just saying, the overall messaging is the same, and it’s easier to sit through.
Let’s start with the bad parts of the adaptation, and ease into the good, cause I feel like I need to earn the skeptics trust first:
- A lot of the jokes fell really flat. I don’t know how much of this was direction, or Emily Blunt in general, because I felt like she was the biggest culprit of this. The scarf line, overselling the value of the beans, and when she changed the tone of her voice to convince Rapunzel to let down her hair, were played so close to the chest. The whole hair stealing scene in general was malicious instead of comedic.
- I didn’t enjoy how abusive Jack’s mom was. I don’t like her much in the show; it made me uncomfortable watching her berate her son for his intelligence when he may or may not have a learning disability and it was played off for laughs? But at least it kinda sorta seemed like she did love Jack despite her feeling disappointed by him. In the movie, she’s constantly knocking him upside the head and berating him with no affection whatsoever, so I realllllly didn’t care that she died.
- Johnny Depp was UNBELIVABLY UPSETTING in this. I spent the entirety of his appearance on-screen cringing and screaming for him to stop lusting after a literal child. He’s licking his fingers and presenting his crotch to her over and over again. His character design, too, with his candy, cheap suit, and pedo moustache codes him as a sexual predator and it’s complete nightmare fuel. This is why it made me physically nauseous to listen to Red’s song later about him opening her up to new experiences. Get that shit out of here.
- Speaking of strange costume design, Meryl’s old lady makeup was really terrible, and the nails were truly unsettling and distracting.
- They should have included “No More”. I think the baker’s arc is still understandable in the movie, but it would have been nice to have this song included.
Now for the general positive aspects of the movie, and what I considered good creative changes:
- With the exception of the wolf’s suit, the costumes are impressive.
- I thought the actors sang pretty well. They’re not Broadway level, and I’ve already bitched about how annoyed I get when they don’t cast broadway actors in these things, but it wasn’t egregious by any means. Nobody’s performances stuck out to me as bad. I really enjoyed Anna Kendrick the most, however – she did a good job of balancing earnestness and comedy, along with some pretty stellar vocals. Bellas for lyfe.
- Christine Baranski. That is all. At least that’s all for now – I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about how much I love her in Mama Mia 2: Electric Boogaloo and Chicago.
- “Agony” was fucking hilarious. While some of the jokes of the movie did illicit a chuckle out of me, I was giggling incessantly watching this number. It’s acted and shot perfectly, and it was leaps and bounds more entertaining than the rest of musical numbers in the show and the movie.
- They cut the narrator and the dad out of the movie. I can’t imagine anybody arguing for the deadbeat dad to be around since he was added chaos, but a lot of people liked the 4th-wall breaking of the characters turning on the narrator, giving him up to the giant, and watching him fall to his death. There are two functions of the narrator they’d have to accommodate by removing him:
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- The narrator’s death is supposed to articulate how cutthroat the cast is, and how reticent they are to place the blames on themselves for the predicament they’re in. The characters try and give up several other replacement people to the giant after the narrator dies, which proves the point anyway. While it’s a funny moment in the show, breaking the 4th wall never happens again afterward, and feels like a very strange way to get the narrator off the stage to allow the actor to play the father for the rest of the story.
- The narration throughout the show gives the audience the feeling they’re reading/watching a fairytale. By having the baker narrate instead, they fill that requirement, and also add a nice bookend to the story. The baker is the one telling this tale to his son at the end, so it makes sense that he’d be the one guiding the audience through the experience.
- I will concede, however, that without the clear removal of the narrator, it does seem strange that the narration does not continue through the second half of the movie. The choice to include narration could be viewed as a way to make up for script deficiencies, as it was abandoned halfway through the film.
- The tone was a bit different and less comedic, but the original fairy tales are dark, so I understand why they did this. They’re literally cutting body parts off to shove a blood-soaked foot into a slipper, and it’s played as humor, but like, that’s fucking gruesome, right? There is so little humor in the second act of the show anyways, so I honestly didn’t miss it in the movie. This is also coming from someone who, other than at a few line deliveries from Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason, didn’t laugh much watching the Broadway show, either.
- I gave zero fucks about Rapunzel in the show, so I honestly didn’t care her and the prince fucked off at the beginning of the second act. She’s literally a disembodied voice 75% of the time, with the other 25% being motivation for the witch to feel betrayed and sad. Rapunzel only existed to prove that the witch’s actions of keeping her safe in the tower were motivated out of selfishness, and would ultimately create a rift between the two if Rapunzel were ever provided a better option. Once Rapunzel made the decision to leave her mother, that was all the devastation the witch needed to want to disavow humanity. She had nothing left to defend because she would never be able to repair her relationship with her daughter. She said herself, she’s not good, she’s not nice, she’s just right, and any opinion to the contrary would fall upon deaf ears.
- It was also much clearer the witch disappeared because she threw away the beans, invoking her mother’s curse again. She kind of poofs out of nowhere in the show, leaving me wondering if she’d come back later on.
- I also liked how they displayed the witch’s powers more prominently so it was better understood how much she gave up in pursuit of vanity. The special effects in general were a net positive, and a benefit of translating this to film.
- The baker’s wife actually showed interest in the prince before he started hitting on her, so it felt less out-of-nowhere when they hooked up. Not to say I supported this – this whole plot point is a weird detour, and honestly, it’s unneeded in the show and the movie. If the goal is to show the prince as being frivolous and untrustworthy, him abandoning his kingdom and running away from the giant would be enough for any person to be turned off by him. Cinderella was stepping up to solve the problem, and meanwhile her husband, the one in the true position of power, was wandering around the forest shirking his responsibilities. This would also mean they could cut the baker’s wife’s one-song wavering of her commitment to her new life, cause like, honestly, who cares? Songs that start a conflict at the beginning and resolve it by the end are filler in an already long show with too much shit going on in it.
- I found the plot a lot easier to understand in the movie. When I watched the stage show, I was so confused as to what the hell was happening during “Your Fault”, and had I not watched Sideway’s video beforehand, it would have been a garbled mess to me. When I watched the movie I understood the scene a whole lot better, and I thought it was because of how they shot it, focusing on each character intently when they were singing (I also had subtitles on, which helped). But it wasn’t until Snugboy mentioned they slowed down the song that the fucking lightbulb went off.
- Sondheim loves to do this, create these songs with stupid fast tempos to make their characters seem panicked and flighty. Two notable examples off the top of my head are “The Worst Pies in London” and “Not Getting Married Today”. If one person is singing it’s easier for me to focus on, but if there are like 4 people with 4 different agendas screaming over each other as quickly as possible, my frustration increases because my focus is being pulled in 4 competing directions. Slowing it down was the right call, leaving its content to be more impactful.
So… after all that, would I recommend this movie to anybody? No. I don’t like any of the songs other than “Agony”, and the plot is convoluted and tedious. Snugboy wondered who the intended audience of this movie was, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who don’t like musicals. Like most movie adaptations, they’re trying to appeal to the largest group of people possible, and they took out a lot of the hokey stuff in an attempt to convince the more serious viewer of the film’s merit. It’s why we’ve gotten a gritty adaptation of Les Miserables, a Girl Boss version of Beauty and the Beast, and pleasureless rendition of Sweeney Todd. When adaptations fundamentally do not understand what makes the original show so revered, they’re bound to alienate its fans. While I wasn’t personally offended by this version of Into the Woods, it’s because I don’t understand what makes the source material so appealing. To me, the movie does a pretty good job of illustrating that selfish wishes may not make you happy, and if your actions in pursuit of your desires actively work against the greater good, or hurt the ones around you, they will ultimately backfire. However, to the fans of Into the Woods, I do know how annoyed I felt after watching Sweeney, and I sympathize with you.
Next week let’s continue to live in the magical, mystical world of parenting with Mary Poppins.