Marshall: Into The Woods (2014)

In some ways, Stephen Sondheim’s musicals defy being actually staged. For the most part, their tone treads such a fine line between dissonant naturalism and the more inclusive, upbeat tendencies of musical theatre that they seem to exceed any kind of performance that is erected around them, especially in a contemporary milieu in which musical theatre seems to be increasingly collapsed into a retro camp pastiche that is utterly inimical to Sondheim’s style. Add to that the fact that Sondheim’s music often occurs at a cinematic pace, with abrupt transitions in tone and space that almost seem to conjur up cuts and montage sequences as they proceed, and it’s quite striking that there have only been two other film adaptations of his work, although he contributed songs to a great number of films between Harold Prince’s adaptation of A Little Night Music – itself an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night – and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Where Prince pretty much offered a filmed play, and Burton aimed for a more fluid combination of film and theatre, Marshall’s adaptation falls somewhere in between, in something like a stand-alone film that just happens to feel as if Sondheim has contributed every song on the soundtrack, possibly at the last moment or as a hasty afterthought. In some ways, that makes for a more satisfying experience than actually seeing Into The Woods onstage, not least because it’s such an ensemble musical, with many different voices and episodes interweaving simultaneously, a feature that Marshall makes the most of in some of the film’s most soaring and panoramic sequences, which are occasionally shot so tightly and perfectly that it’s impossible to tell if a chord inspired a cut, or a cut inspired a chord. At the same time, though, and for all the magical interludes and special effects, it’s an adaptation that makes you aware of how evocative the abstracted, stylised space of the stage can be – in some ways, it would work better if it were more abstract, or more willing to abstract Sondheim’s music into cinematography, rather than setting – as the relentless Disney backdrops leach a great deal of the distinctive dissonance and melancholy from Sondheim’s signature, reslulting in some arrangements that will be quite startling for fans of the original production, or even the more recent Broadway revival. In that sense, it’s a bit of a conundrum, an adaptation that feels completely, evocatively prescient of the inherently cinematic qualities of Sondheim’s work, but that doesn’t seem to feel confident enough to translate them into an actual film that’s true to this specific work – a film that would inevitably be much darker and more distressing than this odd, slightly confected combination of Game of Thrones, Maleficent and Disney’s need for a PG rating.