Film Friday: Into The Woods (2014)

I didn’t know what to expect from Into The Woods. The trailer looked good and I do enjoy a good musical. And this one apparently did pretty well on Broadway and in London for over three decades. It seemed to have good actors in it too and great effects. So it probably should have been pretty good. Yet, I’m going to use this film to discuss what I really despise about Broadway.

Plot

Into The Woods binds together several fairy tale stories to create a new story. The plot is meant to come across as complex and clever, but honestly it feels derivative, predictable and muddled and far too cynical.

The story follows a whiny Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt), who want to have a child. The reason they can’t have a child is because their neighbor, an evil Witch (Meryl Streep) cursed the Baker’s father because he stole magic beans from her garden. Her curse was that the Baker’s father’s family tree would be barren.

Streep, however, has decided that she wants to undo the curse. She doesn’t give a reason for her change of heart, but it seems that undoing the curse will give her back her youthful good looks, which were stolen from her by some other curse. To end the curse, the Baker must collect a white cow, a red cloak, a golden slipper, and some golden hair. So the Baker sets out into the forest to collect these items.

As you might expect, he trades Jack some magic beans for his white cow. He saves Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf. His Wife steals Cinderella’s (Anna Kendrick) slipper. And the golden hair comes from Rapunzel, who was his father’s daughter until she was taken by the Witch and hidden in the tower. Of course, each of these stories is corrupted to a degree and the characters all seem to be randomly roaming the forest as the plot needs.

Fast forward: the Baker gets the stuff and the Witch reverses the spell. That’s where the film should have ended, but it doesn’t. Instead of rolling credits, as should have been done, the film falls way off the rails. The Prince (Chris Pine) marries Cinderella and then proves to be unfaithful because he’s a prince and little girls need to be warned that they can’t rely on princes!! (Sorry, I was channeling a feminist.) He fools around with the Baker’s cougar Wife, who the writer seems to think is only living up to her potential by having an affair. Rapunzel learns to hate her mother the Witch for a reason she already knew long ago. A giant attacks and get this... it’s a woman! Ha ha! OMG Isn’t that clever?! Well, of course it is... because the characters tell us so four or five times. Several characters die because life is about suffering when you work in theater, and the story just kind of winds down with no one living happily ever after because leftists don’t know jack about how to end a story.

Why I Liked This Less and Less As It Dragged On

Where do I start about what I hated about this film. How about at the beginning?

The story felt derivative. And I don’t just mean because I saw Once Upon A Time first. The problem is this: the writer took the most well-known fairy tales and wove them together in the exact way you would have expected. No attempt was ever made to get off the most obvious path. For example, if you’re going to use Cinderella, the most obvious way would be to create a need to steal her slipper. Ditto on Red Riding Hood’s cloak and Rapunzel’s hair. Yet the writer never thought to make them important to the story for some other reason. Thus, there isn’t a single moment where you are surprised in the least.

The characters are awful too. I hated them all and just didn’t care what happened to them. The Baker was unbelievably whiny. Even worse, because liberals believe intent is what matter, we were supposed to like these people even though they spent their time abusing and defrauding everyone they met because they claimed to feel bad about it. Huh? The Princes (there are two) were gay lounge lizards. Jack was a thug in the body of a child. Red Riding Hood was as wooden as a robot and seemed psychotically cold about death. Cinderella was full of anguished indecision in every scene, but the things she anguished about weren’t things anyone cares about. And all of them, every single one, was self-obsessed. The end result was that the characters came across as rotten, whiny and unpleasant. They aren’t people you want to see succeed... or spend time with.

The songs were crap too. Did I mention that this was a musical? Yeah. It was the type of musical with very few actual songs, but lots and lots of dialog being sung as pretend songs. This is something I hate about many Broadway productions. It seems that there are three or four standard song formulas Broadway uses. Depending on the emotion of the scene, the correct formula song is chosen and the dialog is jammed into the form with the proper rhyme scheme. The end result is that you spend the whole time hearing them sing whatever stupid lyrics they have while humming the more famous versions of the same song from prior musicals... “Isn’t that ‘The Candy Man’ from Willy Wonka?” What’s more, the songs are so forgettable and generic that you can replace them with their counterparts from other musicals and I seriously doubt anyone would know the difference.

This is lazy and it’s annoying. It also encourages the actors to engage in melodramatic Broadway acting styles. “Golly gee whiz (swing arm like a newsie).” I find this super annoying. Why? Think of it this way. How sick are you of Johnny Depp playing the same drunk over and over on film these days? This is the same thing... only it’s being done in musical after musical for decades regardless of who the actor is. Talk about annoying!

The writer was an ass too. Three crimes against writing come to mind here in particular. First, it was obvious that the writer carefully avoided doing anything clever for the first four or five hours of the film... ok, it was only 124 minutes, but it felt twice as long. At no point does this writer ever trust the audience to use their brains; everything is spoon-fed to you and served on white bread. Secondly, the writer has insecurity issues. I know this because the story is full of moments where the writer has characters tell you how clever the writing is. If you find yourself doing that, it’s because you suck. And third, the ending is total crap.

The film should have ended about twenty minutes sooner than it does. But it didn’t. Instead, the characters venture back into the woods for no valid reason. Once in the woods, the writer has them engage in out-of-character moments (like having an affair) so he can effectively slander them one by one. Then the film just kind of ends. This entire scene is confusing, pointlessly dark, pointless and it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the film at all. And the only reason I can see for doing it is that the writer is a cynical prick who thinks it’s clever to twist these characters into rotten people. Since attacking these characters was a popular activity on the left at the time this was first written, I assume this was ideological.

All in all, I have to say that this film stunk. The characters are impossible to like. The story is mind-numbingly boring and predictable until the ending, which is random and hateful. The songs are entirely forgettable and derivative. And the story seems intent on making you hate fairy tale characters.

This is Broadway at its worst. Thoughts?