Over the weekend, I saw Into the Woods and, well, I guess I’m not as forgiving as Christopher Frizzelle. Meryl Streep gave a great performance, and so did Emily Blunt and Chris Pine, but overall the movie was just aggressively bland. Like most movie musicals of the last couple decades, director Rob Marshall somehow made the movie feel like it was filmed in a shoebox; it felt small and inconsequential and weirdly paced.
Part of the problem is that it’s hard to adapt a theatrical musical into a movie without completely restructuring the whole thing. Into the Woods is perfectly constructed around the idea of an intermission, and the lack of intermission makes the movie feel like it’s two completely different short stories screeened back-to-back. And Christopher mentioned in his review that the lack of immediacy of film pulls some of the joy out of the performances, which is a problem that plagues every film adaptation of a play. But these aren’t insurmountable problems. Hollywood has been adapting plays into movies for a century now, and some of those movies are masterpieces. But every movie musical I can think of from the last twenty years or so has been entirely forgettable. Why is this?
I think part of the problem is that singing has a different effect on stage than it does in a movie. In the theater, when you can feel a performer’s voice run through you, singing feels expansive and soaring. In movies, more often than not, singing feels more interior than it does on the stage. Theatrical singing projects outward, movie singing focuses inward, like a monologue. And yes, there are plenty of contradictions to this slapdash theory of mine, but those contradictions exist because the filmmaker worked hard to direct the energy of the music outward. When you have song after song in the hands of an inferior director, a movie musical starts to feel like a fever dream, or the fantasy of a particularly fussy mind. The world feels small and weird and forgettable. I don’t know any other way to explain why the 2012 movie version of Les Misérables felt like a tiny little puppet show.
You know what helps expand a film? Dance. And most modern movie musicals don’t have much choreography to speak of. I think the limited choreography of “Agony” helps explain why it’s one of the most memorable numbers in Into the Woods. The actors are moving, interacting with their world, in time with the music, and so it’s way more entertaining than, say, Emily Blunt walking sadly around the woods and singing to herself. Think back on the most memorable moments of the most forgettable musicals of the last few years, and most of them involve dancing. (Chicago, for instance, would never have done as well as it did without Catherine Zeta Jones.) Is dancing dead in Hollywood? Not quite; movies like Bring It On and Magic Mike succeed precisely because audiences are hungry for choreography. But the idea of an entertainer—someone who’s good at singing and dancing and acting—has become a rarity. Neil Patrick Harris and Hugh Jackman are treated like bizarre polymaths, rather than the bare minimum requirement for stardom. We’ll never have a truly great Hollywood musical until we get some actors who aren’t afraid to get physical and look a little goofy for the sake of the show. More and more, that kind of actor seems to be going extinct.