Into the Woods

Into the Woods (the movie)

Okay, Stephen Sondhiem's (lyricist and composer) masterpiece musical here still relates to me personally.  This play got me through being eighteen.  The themes in it kept me going.  Nobody is alone.  The difference between good and bad, right and wrong, nice.  Of how we listen to those we love, but not to the things they think they are telling us, but what we see of them.   If you go back far enough in my blogs, you will find a post about the play.

In Into the Woods fairy tale characters such as (cast as in movie) Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) and Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) from "Jack and the Beanstalk" must enter the woods in order to complete their stories.  The stories are woven together by the tale of the Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt).  In order to get the Witch (Meryl Streep) to reverse a curse making it impossible for them to have children, they must gather items associated with various fairy tales, such as one of Cinderella's shoes.  The witch uses these items in a spell.  The fairy tales closely follow grim Grimm brothers, and even taints of the stories before the brothers got a hold of them.

Screenplay and musical by James Lapine and directer by Rob Marshall, I expected this Disney interpretation to fall down.  This is a complex and rich play.  I have to say it was fun to watch.  I'm not going to tell you not to go see it, but I was right about the let down.

Disney's movie lost all the themes.  It was a movie with the occasional song as an afterthought, not a musical.  Songs were cut in favor of an obsession with explaining what was going on rather than letting it happen.  Disney's movie was a fun mish mash of fairy tales, but lost the finer points.

The woods became fraught with large, twisted trees as the characters moved farther in.  It did invoke an idea of differentness than the village.  For some reason the director was obsessed with mud.  The entire place was wet.  The characters came from a very average village in peasant's or king's clothing as was fit.

However the movie lost the true magic of the play and the woods in particular.  The world in the play is a stylized one.  The world is one of fairy tales.  Mud, depressing homes, dreary clothes--reality in general plays no part.  The idea was to have this world change as they entered the woods, but as the woods were also dreary, it gave the movie a dank, dark quality completely inappropriate to a movie made of fairy tales and their undoing.

I had heard that Johnny Depp made for an annoying wolf, but I have to say he was one of my favorite parts.  I used to be a huge Depp fan from the era of such as Ed Wood.  Even the first Pirates of the Caribbean:  Curse of the Black Pearl--he stole the film with a character of his own brilliant creation.  Unfortunately after that it was as if he got stuck on Jack Sparrow.  His usually impeccable taste in choosing roles went down hill.  Every character was some reiteration of Jack Sparrow.

But as the Wolf, Depp echoed his old days working with Tim Burton.  His stylized hungry and sexualized wolf in anachronistic clothing represented the outlandish and stylized world that should have represented the woods.  Little Red Riding Hood is not a central character, but her story has always been one of my favorites.  The direction, though not Depp, underplayed the fact the story is about the loss of virginity.  Marshall made a poor choice in representing Little Red Riding Hood as young as he did.  In all versions I have seen, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack are teenagers.  Here they were children.  This was problematic for Riding Hood's story as an already mixed set of feelings for the metaphor of a loss of virginity became disturbing due to her age.

Of course, Disney undercut the sexy quality beneath all aspects of the play.

The woods are more than a place were magic happens.  They are the liminal space.  A place of borders crossed.  A place were lives could change.  Where the subconscious became conscious.  The concept of the woods as a world of metaphors and archetypes, only to become broken archetypes--this was one of the things I always loved about this piece.  I sorely missed it here.

The play is a complicated one, I will give you that, and the need to simplify must have been strong.  The choice to nix songs for explanations to beat the plot into the audience's head did not work.  The songs that were left out, the screen time given to the Baker, the hero of the piece, sidelined him as a plot device to keep all the stories intertwined.  Two choices had an especially bad effect.

The first was to remove the Baker's father as a character.  I can see how he might have been thought of as a complication, but without him, the Baker does not sing his duet with his father.  That song is the pivotal piece in the Baker's character at the end.  Without it, his arc clunked.

The other was to have the narrator as a voice over instead of a character.  It must have felt natural to make the narrator narration, but he plays a critical role in the play.  Without him, the devolution of the fabric of the fairy tales in the second half makes no sense.

The Witch's two heartbreaking songs--"Lament" and  "Children Will Listen " were undercut by the change of Rapunzel's (Mackenzie Mauzy) role and the fact the second song was done as a soaring voice over instead of giving Meryl Streep the chance to go all out on her acting.  Also, I love Meryl Streep, but Bernadette Peters created the role, and in my mind it still belongs to her.  Meryl Streep comes in second class.

Most of the problems were not due to the actors, but to the rewrite of the script and especially Marshall's direction.  Again, if you want to go see a show about fairy tales going wild, this is a fun fluff piece for the most part.  You'll probably have fun.

But if you want to understand Sondheim's vision, go watch the play.  Barring chances to do that,  the TV show American Playhouse, which shows tapings of plays, has a great version directed by Lapine.

In the meantime, I hope to see you in the in-betweens.

Diana Wynne Jones

All right, this is late in coming, but I must:  the Homage to Diana Wynne Jones.

I cut my teeth on Diana Wynne Jones.  My mother read Jones to my brother and me as we sat by the Franklin stove cold wintered.  As I got older and learned more about writing I returned again and again to her earlier writing.  In books such as Charmed Life, what is so fascinating is that not only does Jones create complex characters that drive the book, but they drive a complicated book in a YA format.

When I look at Rowling, I do not see a visionary genius--as much as I might be hated for that remark.  I see someone standing on the shoulders of Jones.  Gaiman was in close with Jones.  In Britain, she is well known.  Here, she was out of print till the Rowling explosion brought her back to the fore (and for that I will thank Rowling as searching out Jones's novels on line and in used bookstores was an exhausting endeavor).

 When I first start describing Charmed Life:  orphaned Cat and Gwendolyn are taken in by their mysterious relative Chrestomancie--sounds really fucking simple, right?  And something you would put in a query letter, which I despise.  When I try to tell a friend who wants to read the book what it is about (don't worry, no spoilers)--with Howl's Moving Castle and Archer's Goon and Witch Week as well--what starts simple, I realize the plots are complex in a beautifully streamlined way.  She gets away with all of it because her characters have an inner complexity that puts me in mind of a snowflake, or Jenga.  If she had moved one piece of her characters out of line, the whole book would fail.  But because each character has the inner integrity of a tank, you never question one move that character makes or, because of her world building and other characters, why that choice lands the character where it does.

That is the key to a novel, in my opinion.  The characters must be complex, but that complexness cannot be loose.  You can't have facets of them hanging every which way that could easily be ripped off or fall off and not change the basic integrity of the character.  Each piece of the character must be vital, and stack together into an important vehicle that will take us seamlessly through the novel.  Everyone talks about the need for complex characters, but we rarely discuss the fact that every complexity has to be build in, to have grown in a tangled knot with every other complexity.  That character will determine the world we see.  That character will determine in what direction the we, as readers, move.  If we feel that viewpoint or movement is false, we will lose the book.

Not to say that absolutely every one of Jones's novels are epitome the of fabulous writing.  She has written, over her long, and now cut dead, career a swath of childrens', young adult, and adult fantasy.  She has explored Tam Lin in multiple books.  She, as far as I know, created the idea of a "multiverse"--that being more than one universe through dimensions.  We all know it has been around in speculative fiction forever, but I still find her classification charming.

Towards the end of her career, I have to admit my heart sank a bit.  She still used marvelously complex and original plots, but I felt as though sometimes they drove the character, rather than the other way around.  Her characters' strengths are what make me love her, and make me beholden to her for my own values in writing.

Her passing passed us by without much of a bump, but we will feel the reverberations of what she created in others work throughout the years.  If you have any wish to write--yes, especially speculative fiction, but really in any genre--go pick up the four books I listed above:  Charmed Life, Witch Week, Archer's Goon, and Howl's Moving Castle (which isn't anything like the movie, by the way).  Read them once and fall in love.  Read them again and understand what and how she created.

Why me?

So the question is, why do I get to blog?  This is a conundrum I've always had about blogging.  Who decides what is interesting?  However, that's the great thing about blogging.  Everyone's voice counts equally.  In writing and in teaching, I have found discovering your own sense of voice paramount.  The internet is a seething, tangled mess of indie.

Everyone has a voice worth using, and a story worth telling.  What separates those who are heard from those who aren't involves two main elements:  1.  Moxie.  You have to actually believe you are worth people's time and energy, and do something about it.  2.  Can you do it well?

That's why I'm devoting a blog to the study of literature, and to the study of my own writing process--my own literature.  I write memoir, so of course I'm going to sneak my life in here somewhere.  I also write a lot of fantasy, because I find the ability to move symbol into myth and back again a fascinating way to study character and every day life.

Please comment.  I love comments.  They make me all warm and fuzzy.  If you have any questions about writing or reading, I'm drowning in Ed. and workshopping experience, so I would be happy to share.

Share soon, share often, over share.  Bets