I Want Out of the Woods

A Review of Into the Woods

Admittedly, I know nothing of the musical Into the Woods besides a heavily edited high school performance seen well over a decade ago.  It didn't make an impression then either.  The premise of the story, an intertwining of plots and characters from several fairy tales (Grimm originals, to boot), seemed promising.  That and the the all-star cast line-up enticed me to click play while I was browsing Netflix one evening.

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The beginning is the best part of the whole film.  It only goes downhill from there.  The way the stories wove together were, well...passable.  And that's the best I can say about it.

I liked the setup, placing the baker and his wife into the Rapunzel tale.  The expectation of things coming together, especially the opening song, had my attention.  Emily Blunt performs very well as the Baker's Wife, combining musical dialogue with humor.  I'm fond of James Corden and pleased with his casting.  Little Red Riding Hood's introduction as the glutton is cute as well.  Interesting parallels there between her and the wolf.

As the movie played on, I felt a gaping lack of attachment to the characters--other than Mr. and Mrs. Baker: infertility is a profound struggle that touches far too many.  And Emily Blunt carried that for me.  The princes bored me to tears.  Rapunzel was a nobody; Cinderella was, as the witch says, merely "nice;" and the children are downright annoying.  Is the head-slapping relationship between Jack and his mother supposed to be endearing?

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Meryl Streep's character is meant to express moral ambiguity, I get it, but there should have been some sort of tie-in between the bakers' infertility and her kidnapping the baker's sister to be her adoptive daughter.  What we get is tiresome sung-exposition.  Insert the Willy Wonka Gene Wilder meme here:  Tell me again about the complex parent-child relationship that plays out in complex ways and is complex!!!!  The witch having never previously expressed a desire for a child and the total lack of screen time between her and her "daughter" killed the effectiveness of any would-be emotional impact.  We could have done with a little character development.

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In the end, the characters all work together and all get their wishes.

But--this musical wants to slap it into our heads as surely as Jack's mother--you should be careful what you wish for.  After the curtains close on the traditional endings, there is still another dragging hour of  movie left; during which, in-between trying to avoid the wrath of a giantess, they all come together to be communally unsatisfied.  A theme that feels heavy-handed and forced, desperate to join the lineup of postmodernist deconstructed fairy tales.  The deaths are stupid and pointless.  The ending utterly anti-climactic.  Into the Woods tries be profound and it's just not.  Somehow, that is worse than if they'd decided to say "sod it all!" and just make something fun and ridiculous.

Wikipedia reports that the play's

basic insight ... is at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong — which is to say, almost everything that can — arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions.

Nothing that the original stories didn't already do, and do better.

What did you think of this film?  How does it compare to the musical?  Did I miss something essential that would have otherwise earmarked this a landmark production?

Disenchanted: the Fairies Return to Post-War England

Maria Tatar's introduction preps the pallet for the fairy tales that follow in Peter Davies's The Fairies Return: Or, New Tales for Old, a 1930's book republished for Jack Zipes's Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series.

The settings [of the Anglicized tales from Europe and the Orient] are Devonshire, Scotland, Ireland, and London--anything but the native soil from which some of the tales sprang.  As importantly, the untroubled appropriation of stories from the world over suggests that the tales have truly become British, that they have migrated with ease into a new culture and medium, making themselves available for literary adaptation and refashioning, once they have established themselves as part of a native storytelling tradition.

Though it is certainly not the only ingredient, the Englishness of these re-told fairy tales is the first and strongest to catch the attention.

"Jack the Giant Killer," by A.E. Coppard reads like newspaper headlines overheard as gossip on the street.  When three giants arrive in London from nowhere-in-particular, the citizens spend a lot of time talking about doing something and never doing it.  Enter Jack, a young fisherman from Cornwall.

Jack shows up at the Boss's house.  Love-at-first-sight follows with the Boss's daughter, 

. . . a fine piece, as plump as a leveret, and her name was Primrose.  She sat down beside their grandfather's clock and looked at Jack.  The more she looked the more she liked.  She grew quite fond of him.  His hair was red and his figure was good.  He liked her and the look of her.

He told the Boss he would undertake the extermination of the giants.  'Pray do,' said the Boss.  'I myself will privately double the reward. . . .'

'Never mind the reward,' Jack answered.

'What!' cried this Primrose.  'It is twenty thousand pounds now, and you are but a poor fisher lad!'

'I know,' said he; 'and of course I wouldn't mind it, in a manner of speaking, and I wouldn't refuse it, but I'd do it just the same for love--if you understand me rightly.'

The beauteous Primrose went up to him and put her two milk-white hands on his shoulder.  'I do,' she murmered.  'You are the dream of my life.'

[. . .]

'Shall I see you again?' [Jack] asked Primrose.

'Any time you like,' answered the princess--for such she undboutedly was.

It is all very practical and un-romanticized.  If it weren't for the obviously tongue-in-cheek tone, I might mistake it for a forerunner to magical realism.

copyright Michaela Knížová

In contrast to the bread-and-butter plainness of the 20th century English "peasantry," we have the depiction of the more elegant, much more ridiculous aristocracy in Lord Dunsany's "Little Snow-White," "With reverent apologies to the memory of Grimm:"

It will of course be remembered that Lord and Lady Clink, after the second marriage of the former, did a good deal of entertaining at their house in Grosvenor Square.  Ostensibly the innumerable parties were to amuse Blanche, the daughter of Lord Clink by his first marriage; but, as she was often in bed before they started, there were those who attributed the lavish entertainment to a certain frivolity in Lady Clink, or a merely perverse intention to flout those taxes that are so much a feature of our country.  Of these entertainments it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader, culminating as they did in the festivities on the occasion of the coming out of Blanche Clink, an event scarcely likely to be forgotten, either on account of the magnificence of Lady Clink's hospitality or because the unusual circumstance that Blanche came out at the age of seven.  [emphasis mine]

Instead of a magic mirror, the queen-figure has a gramophone which "speaks" to her.  It is the best money can buy.  

I am reminded of Chesterton's swift condemnation:  "The gramophone is a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have."  There is biting irony in Lord Dunsany's use of this new invention as the wicked magical medium of Snow White's evil stepmother.

Instead of a huntsman, there is a chauffeur.  Instead of dwarfs, there are seven miners--not entirely new in itself but relevant enough to the scene.  Instead of a prince, there is the son of an entrepreneurial businessman named Mooch.

Dunsany's dismissal of wonder is easily summed up in the sentences, "And one of these bumps shook the bit of apple out of Blanche's mouth, the bit where it joins the stalk, where the arsenic solution had gathered.  And the effect of this, as anyone who understands poisons will tell you, was to bring Blanche alive again."

Ms. Tatar notes that, "Satire, with its historical specificity and commitment to topical issues, does not inhabit a 'once upon a time' but the 'here and now.'"

Both satire and fairy tale are driven by lack, by a sense that something vital is missing and that social circumstance shave made life short, nasty, and brutish. . . .  If satire is missing the rainbow promise of "happily ever after" found in fairy tales, it contains the Enlightenment promise that reason and wit will lead to steady improvements.

In the wake of the Great War, in the deep bowl of economic depression, on the doorstep of World War II, these stories are the cultural tradition of a disillusioned generation.  These are not fairy tales in the tradition sense.  As I read on, I don't believe they will offer an inkling of things-working-behind-the-scenes that seem to pull the strings behind the old folklore.

Still, they are skilfully and delightfully executed renderings, a treasure-collection of the talents of the time, and plain good literature.  I recommend them without hesitation.

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