Into the Woods (2015)

The thing about musicals is that they’re melodramatic. I’m not their biggest fan but, the way I understand it, the conceit is this: emotional things happen and excitement swells until the characters involved just cannot keep from spontaneously exploding with all of their joy and sadness into song. Which is fine. I mean, it’s weird, but every genre has its rules, so fine.

When they work on stage, the best musicals have big characters brimming with melodrama. This is partly so audiences on the back row can see what’s going on (and partly because the songs have to be justified somehow). On film, you don’t need to be so big. You have to find ways of communicating the brash audacity of a stage show with devices particular to the medium. That’s how Les Miserables (2012) worked; that’s how Sweeney Todd (2007) worked. Both of these films feel like films. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods feels like a filmed musical, a throwaway money-spinner.

Les Mis was big in that its characters maintained the melodrama of the stage and were then knowingly filmed in portrait-style close-ups to give audiences a perspective they could never have even sitting on the front row in a theatre. That’s really smart.

Sweeney Todd was big in that, in the hands of a gothic auteur, it was drenched in the visual language of a silent movie and injected with pace by a man who knows a few things about cutting.

As with adapting novels, so with adapting musicals. You won’t offend anyone by blandly covering all the angles and making sure the actors read the script and sing the songs. But it takes a bolder attitude to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The wit of Sondheim and his distinctively angular vocal lines will always be a pleasant thing to sit through but that’s where the good time ends. As a film, Into the Woods just feels exhausting and unnecessary.

August: Osage County

 August: Osage County has a lot going for it. It has a lot of what a great film needs – rich characters, excellent performances and a well-constructed narrative. Despite this, it is a play, not a film.

Firstly, praise. Everyone on screen does a fantastic job, especially Meryl Streep whose turn as the family’s poisonous matriarch is definitely as Oscar-worthy as Cate Blanchett’s Blue Jasmine (one or the other should win it). The writing is solid. The dialogue rises from a cast of characters so well drawn that the story feels multi-protagonist despite it being clear that Julia Roberts’ Barbara has the most defined arch. As with the best stories, it isn’t forced. The drama, darkness and comedy all leak incidentally out of the narrative which comes simply because the family of characters bump, bounce and clash naturally.

The best scenes are those that jump out as being obviously written for stage. Simmering emotions in claustrophobic rooms make for dialogue that just fizzes. 2 hours went by with my engagement unbroken because the combination of great writing and great acting hold the thing together like gaffa tape.

However.

The things that are great about the film don’t belong on film. They don’t utilise in any way what film can do.

That great edict ‘show don’t tell’ applies just as much in the cinema as it does on the stage. But what changes from medium to medium is what can be shown. On the stage, dialogue is king. What is said and what is not said is what makes a great play. I’ve no doubt that August: Osage County is a great play because what I just saw at the cinema was a great play… but not a film.

When putting a play on film, certain things need changing to make it work in the new medium. What Osage County needed in its adaptation was to make room for a film director to bring something cinematic to proceedings. One simple thing a film can do, for example, is extreme close-ups; audiences can see large emotional shifts in small facial gestures, something that simply can’t travel 10 rows when watching a play in a theatre. In that case, why not replace some of the hefty dialogue with some carefully judged close-ups, or a smart cutaway, or a tracking shot or just something cinematic? Anything would do.

Plays do their ‘showing’ in dialogue, films do theirs in visuals.

The failure is not the direction; it is the adaptation. It feels as if nothing has been adapted. The director is given nothing to do. I can only assume that there’s something intrinsic about the play that Tracy Letts wanted to preserve and couldn’t bring himself to lose in the translation. It may well be that changing what is intrinsic about it for the cinema would ruin its essence. But in that case, why put it on film?

Probably money?

By virtue of the medium, cinema can reach a wide audience cheaply in no time at all – you travel miles to see a play in a specific theatre in a specific city whereas films pretty much come to you wherever you are. Maybe its producers thought that slapping August: Osage County onto the big screen as it is would stick like magic. Or maybe they thought it would just make a tonne of money.