Into the Woods (2014)

INTO THE WOODS               B+              
USA  (124 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Rob Marshall                       Official site

Into the woods,
It’s time to go,
I hate to leave,
I have to, though.
Into the woods-
It’s time, and so
I must begin my journey.

Into the woods
And through the trees
To where I am
Expected ma’am,
Into the woods
To Grandmother’s house-

—Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford)

When you’re dead, you’re dead.         —The Witch (Meryl Streep)

One of the most beloved musicals in the Sondheim repertoire, one that inverts the childlike innocence of fairy tales, ingeniously combining several classic fairy tales into a single story, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, allowing tragedy, heartache, and death to intrude, creating a post apocalyptic feel that mirrors today’s post 9/11 world where unspeakable horrors continue to plague and traumatize a harrowed worldwide population, especially each new generation of children.  Originally opening on Broadway on November 5, 1987, the production won three Tony Awards, Best Score (Sondheim), Best Book (or Story, James Lapine), and Best Actress in a Musical (Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s wife) in a year dominated by The Phantom of the Opera, winner of seven Tony awards, becoming the longest running Broadway show in history.  While the original film version, Into the Woods (1991), directed by Lapine was simply filming a live performance of the original Broadway cast in front of an audience, the original singers are far superior, especially Bernadette Peters, who simply exudes greater complexity, bringing more humor and anguished personality into the Witch, while the comic timing throughout is more free flowing as well, but this is a much more entertaining version as the camera isn't so suffocatingly confined to fixed positions, though the direction does feel distracting at times.  More importantly, in both productions the Sondheim complexity really does shine through, where the theatrical experience is not only among the best Sondheim productions of his entire career, rivaling West Side Story (1957) and Company (1970), but among the most transforming theatrical experiences ever.  Nonetheless, the film underwent many changes to be brought to the screen by Disney, which will invariably be questioned, especially by Sondheim purists who wouldn’t change a thing, but it does streamline a three-hour production, with an Intermission, into a two-hour film.  First off, it eliminates about ten songs, including two new songs written by Sondheim specifically for the film that were also dropped.  Additionally, there is no narrator standing off to the side of the stage, which is seen as more of a theatrical device, instead the narration is provided by the Baker (James Corden) from the opening scene, which adds a bit of symmetry as he is again telling a story at the end of the movie.     

While Into the Woods (1991) *is* the definitive stage version, after the passing of 25 years, perhaps it’s due for a reassessment.  It’s worth noting that the legendary Bob Fosse took the stage version of Cabaret and completely changed it for the film, which won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, beating out Francis Ford Coppola in the process for THE GODFATHER (1972), Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor.  Fosse cut two major characters, remade the lead into an American, and cut most of the material except for the songs in the nightclub, and for that the man is considered a genius.  Comparatively speaking, these are only minor alterations, none of which change the tone of the original, except perhaps it’s darker, as none of the characters who are killed off return to the stage for a rousing final number before the curtain falls.  As something of a quest movie, the opening ten minutes or so are a rush of exhilaration built around a single musical theme of “Into the Woods,” which introduces the central characters, the childless Baker (Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt, probably the best thing in the entire show), who have been cursed by the Witch (Meryl Streep in a less comic, much meaner version), who has herself been cursed into ugliness, demanding that they retrieve certain items to reverse the spell in order to conceive a child, where they continue to interact with other storybook characters throughout their journey.  Nearby the poor and not so bright farm boy Jack (Daniel Huddlestone) is scolded by his mother (Tracey Ullman) when he hesitates to take his best friend, a cow named Milky White, to the market for needed money, while Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) is continually humiliated and mistreated at home as she dreams of attending the luxurious Prince’s ball, but visiting her sick grandmother is Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) who gathers as many cookies from the Baker as she can, stuffing them into a basket before she skips along into the woods, meeting a devious wolf (Johnny Depp) who has other ideas along the way.  Often you can’t really tell where one musical number ends and another begins, continually moving in and out of dialogue, where film allows much of the story to be told in flashback, something you can’t do on stage.  

Stage shows are notoriously difficult to bring to the screen, where Sondheim’s earlier A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1977) fell short of audience’s expectations, while Tim Burton’s dark-themed SWEENEY TODD (2007) had flashes of brilliance but catered to a distinct few, quickly leaving the theaters after a short run.  But unlike earlier failed attempts, like CAMELOT (1967) or MAN OF LA MANCHA (1972), the inspiring magic of the Sondheim source material remains intact and can be enthralling, especially for those experiencing it for the first time.  The film is an alluring mix of absurdism and childhood fantasy with real life themes, where the stark seriousness can catch unsuspecting viewers off guard, yet the beauty of the music can literally be enchanting.  There’s a broad attempt to turn this into a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream, an exotic place where a little magic dust gets everything mixed up, including the two Prince Charmings, Star Trek’s Chris Pine as Cinderella’s Prince and Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s Prince, both hamming it up to excessively vulgar and distasteful delight while singing “Agony” like a cologne advertising shoot along some artificial waterfalls, each complaining bitterly about the difficulties encountered in their attempts at romance, eventually marrying their destined fairybook sweethearts before time creates a rift between them, where both cheat on their wives with little to no remorse.  This incident in particular plagues the Baker’s wife, succumbing to the Prince’s charms in a momentary lapse of reason, who feels as if a kind of madness has taken over, as the world around her is quickly coming apart at the seams before she finally comes to her senses, but it’s too late, a victim of the unpredictable violence of the times.  The film retains the brilliance of the original story, which has not only a fascinating interplay between what’s real and what’s imagined, but has another interesting dynamic where children are seen through the eyes of Little Red Riding Hood and Jack, while the emphasis on the Bakers shifts the importance to the views of expectant parents, where the disasters occurring throughout reflect a kind of imaginary world that they both need to navigate their way through together.  When the Witch sings “Stay with Me” to her daughter Rapunzel as she’s about to leave with her Prince, it’s one of the best songs about parental loss ever written.  Perhaps more emphasized in the film are the anxieties associated with parenthood, where the Baker encounters the spirit of his father more as a reflection of his own fear of fatherhood, which is paralleled later near the end when the Baker encounters the spirit of his dead wife, offering him tender but encouraging words of advice about his ability to handle such a complex situation on his own. 

Perhaps no contemporary American composer has broken more rules than Sondheim, who views humankind as potentially problem solving.  To that end, the opening is stuffed full of complicated situations, with each character drawn into this internal whirlwind of the story.  But as the film progresses, the concept of time expands with age, becoming more contemplative, where the marvel of the story is how the characters interact with one another, where their shared conflicts help them grow as they ask questions about what to do.  According to Mark Eden Horowitz’s Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, “wishing” is the key character in Into the Woods, wishing for love, for a child, for understanding, which connects the characters not only to one another but to the audience.  The initial fantasies are elaborated upon through a sophisticated musical score that initially charms and delights before growing more somberly reflective.  Sondheim was himself abandoned by his father at age ten and had a psychologically abusive mother, eventually becoming an institutionalized child having little contact with his original family.  When his mother died in 1992, Sondheim did not attend the funeral.  This dark world of feeling abandoned and disconnected from the world around you is the setting of the film, where the songs literally bring the viewer inside these fragile moments of tragedy and personal loss that become nothing less than heartbreaking in the song “No One Is Alone,” No One Is Alone by Bernadette Peters - YouTube (5:15), where Cinderella, separated from her Prince, comforts Little Red Riding Hood while the Baker, who has lost his wife, consoles Jack after he’s lost his mother.  The film is preoccupied by the tragedy of the times we live in, which has become a much more unstable and threatening world.  Visited by the spirits of the ones they (and we) have lost, it’s the Witch who uncannily sees through this myriad of missed connections, unraveling lives and broken dreams, and as if in a haze delivers one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs, “Children Will Listen,” Children Will Listen by Bernadette Peters - YouTube (3:05), that somehow magically and triumphantly reconnects us all to each other, from one generation to the next, literally transforming this fairy tale about inexplicable loss into a transcendent passion play on love, forgiveness, and human redemption.  

End of Watch

END OF WATCH          B-                

USA  (109 mi)  2012  d:  David Ayer  

Television and the movie industry have been at odds ever since the widespread convenience of owning televisions in every American household became a reality in the 1950’s, where for literally decades television has been in a catch up mode following behind the latest technological and artistic advancements which separate the two mediums, but in the last decade, certainly since the advent of cable channels which don’t edit language, violence, or sexual content, television has actually been leading the way when it comes to the popularity of cops shows, consistently utilizing better scripts, actors, and quality of content.  While occasionally films rise to unprecedented heights, such as HEAT (1995), SE7EN (1995), LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), THE DEPARTED (2006), or ZODIAC (2007), they are countered by The Sopranos (1999 – 2007), The Wire (2002 – 2008), The Shield (2002 – 2008), Dexter (2006 – present), or Southland (2009 – present), all of which in a dozen or so episodes annually play out like an extended mini-series, where the dramatic interest is sustained over a considerable length of time.  Certainly it is the substantial success of these shows that is pushing the development of this adrenaline-laced style of film, from the writer of TRAINING DAY (2001) and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001), resorting to a Starsky and Hutch (1975 – 1979) portrait of likable cop partners, Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), sent out in their squad cars on a daily basis to catch the bad guys, all set in the hyper-kinetic and crime-infested world of South Central Los Angeles.  It’s a gritty portrayal of cops on the beat, expressed through constant motion with quick edits, continuously frenetic hand-held camera movement and a machine-gun style of profanity-laced, rapid fire dialogue, often finding humor in the ridiculous predicaments they get themselves into, where they specialize in patrolling the worst ghetto neighborhoods.  If much of this feels contrived, like the lawlessness of the Wild West, it attempts to use the pervasive presence of violence to amp up the tension, creating a poisonous atmosphere of gangbangers, malicious killers on the loose, and even the drug cartels from the Mexican underworld, as unlike the daily grind of real cops where the routine can become suffocating, much of it spent in the mindless task of filling out paperwork, these are cocky gunslingers looking for action, where every hour of every day is spent seeking out new adventures.

Gyllenhaal and Peña work extremely well together, where you get a good sense of increasingly developing interior character, as both can be goofballs often playing pranks on their fellow cops, where their swaggering attitude differentiates them from other teams of partners, often singled out for their efforts in the field by their more hardened commanding officer Frank Grillo, bringing a military SWAT team style to their everyday practice of policework.  This two man tandem have a reckless feel about them, where they’re still young and just starting out, where their confrontational practice of rubbing elbows and getting in-your-face with notorious outlaws and gangsters seems too edgy, likely not the practice of officers with longevity on the force who exercise more restraint.  These guys come off as Reality TV cops, each with cameras pinned to their vests watching every move they make, where Gyllenhaal in particular is always talking to his camera in man-on-the-street interviews or pointing it in someone’s face, where what’s on the screen often parallels this raw police footage, often feeling unedited and rough-edged, a cop cam providing a stream-of-conscious viewpoint.  In typical Hollywood vernacular, the bad guys are given picturesque names that describe their personalities like Big Evil (Maurice Compte), Wicked (Diamonique), or Tre (Cle Shaheed Sloan), the latter a hot-headed, two-time felon who prefers taking the risk of standing up to cops rather than backing down, actually going toe-to-toe with the shorter, but more bulldog-like Mike (without badge and weapons), which actually earns his respect, where fighting cops barehanded, win or lose, is “gangsta.”  And therein lies the problem here, as the film is more interested in establishing visceral, in-your-face action sequences than delving into the mysteries or social dynamic of this deeply entrenched, poverty stricken world around them, though Tre does express his concern that black neighborhood gangs are being pushed out by Hispanic gangs.  This movie elevates cops to the status of sheriffs in the Wild West, always seen as noble heroes, where the moral line is never crossed or in question, as people are instead good guys or bad guys.  Unlike BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991), for example, the audience learns absolutely nothing about growing up in the South Central neighborhood where every day is a moral dilemma. 

The film has a token use of women, where the one-dimensional Anna Kendrick is Brian’s girl, whose best scene is a PULP FICTION (1994) dance tribute, while Natalie Martinez as Mike’s wife has a fiercer attitude, where they are written into the script as a softer counterbalance to the feverish intensity of the streets where these guys are close to action figures.  Overly reverential towards the police, giving them a stature in the community they don’t deserve, as LA cops are notoriously abusive and corrupt, this film never questions their moral actions or duties, giving instead a fairly adolescent and somewhat fantasy view of what it is to be a cop.  So it’s the script, written by the director who spent his teenage years in South Central, that ultimately falls short, failing to connect gangsters and drug lords to the world from which they came, instead exploiting their nastiness as hideously murderous and grotesque, often making them larger than life foul caricatures, even as several of the gangsters onscreen are played by actual LA gangbangers.  The near screwball comic timing of these two knuckleheads in the patrol car can be outrageously funny, accentuating their close rapport throughout, often making fun of each other’s distinctively different white and Mexican cultures, as it’s their personalities that really carry the picture, along with a few of the gangsters, especially Tre and Big Evil. The director maintains a fluid and kinetic flow throughout, turning much of this into an exhilarating thrill ride, but that’s hardly the life of a real cop, as these two prima donnas flaunt their cowboy personas in the face of their fellow cops, not exactly endearing camaraderie or admiration.  The director also uses horror elements to accentuate fear, like walking into dark and empty corridors just waiting for something to jump out at them, where despite their arrogance, he uses these two officers as innocents walking into the lair of the beast, continually discovering something they haven’t anticipated.  While the film’s aesthetic is gripping and tense, where danger lurks around every corner, this is also a trigger happy exposé on how cops disregard humanity and destroy community relations while ironically spending a lot of talk about loyalty and heroism.  These guys are military style killing machines that routinely trample on the rights of others, busting in with guns flailing, continually pointing their guns in people’s faces, making threats, attempting to match the hostility of their adversaries, all of which represents a very short-sighted view of policework, much of which depends upon the cooperation of local residents, never once considering the long term harm of their actions, as inhabitants of any neighborhood, rich or poor, would soon loathe their disrespecting commando recklessness.