“Part of Your World” is the greatest Disney song of all time. Howard Ashman’s playful and emotive lyrics are perfectly matched by Alan Menken’s plaintive chord progressions. Together they tell the whole story—and literally nothing that follows can be said to lack the psychological grounding for an audience’s intensely felt sympathies. It’s a song that invites us into a girl’s yearning, in this case Ariel, a teenage mermaid who wants desperately to escape the provincial restrictions of her aquatic kingdom and learn something about the wide world above. “What’s a fire and why does it—what’s the word?—burn? When’s it my turn?…” she sings as the number reaches its emotional and melodic peak, dancing its rhymes around the word yearn without ever quite saying it, in a song that’s lyrically about the character’s lack of the vocabulary to fully express what she knows she doesn’t know. She’s yearning. And so are we. The song never fails to move me. Even the first few notes sets my tear ducts welling. They know what’s about to happen to me. And even though the story itself isn’t my total favorite of the Disney animated musicals, that it springs from this source makes me believe in it fully and completely in that moment. The grand symbolic romantic gestures of its thinly drawn prince and sparsely characterized kingdoms make sense only as outgrowths of this adolescent, and yet universal, need to grow and to know.
It seems to me that if someone’s going to remake Disney’s The Little Mermaid, they’d better get that exactly right. In the case of the company’s newest live-action adaptation of an animated classic, they get it right. Halle Bailey is in the lead role, and sells that need from the inner-most soul, her open, expressive face and reaching body language—paired with her lovely singing voice—communicate that combination of stifled curiosity and hopeful tension. Once that number happens, we’re on her side no matter what. The rest of the movie happens about how you’d expect, with her father King Triton (Javier Bardem, sleepily paternal) lashing out at her human curiosity, which sends her into the devious tentacles of Ursula the Sea Witch (Melissa McCarthy, in a passable karaoke performance). She’s gifted human form to woo the prince of her dreams (Jonah Hauer-King, handsomely anonymous). But the bad deal sends her ashore without her voice, leading to a romantic silent flirtation and much silliness from animal sidekicks, before it’s all resolved on a dark and stormy night. The adaptation lacks in surprise, and extends the story with a few new songs and added texture to the surface dwellers’ characters. But because it’s anchored so firmly to Ariel’s yearning, it maintains a certain dignity and investment.
The movie is, taken on its own terms, a fine fantasy musical. It has a sympathetic lead, a decently appealing romantic interest, and a handful of the best songs ever written for the screen. And yet, it’s difficult to take on its own terms, as difficult as it is to take any of these live action remakes of animated Disney musicals as an individual work of moviemaking. The former wouldn’t exist in this form if not for the latter. That makes it harder to look at the relatively lackluster staging of “Under the Sea” and, instead of enjoying the swirl of photo-realistic anemones and tortoises wriggling to the beat while the vaguely cartoony crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs) croons, unconsciously compare it to the ecstatic joys of the zippy, gag-filled, color-explosion chorus number that is the original. Still, one can’t entirely resist the charms of such buoyant musical material, even at three-quarters the energy. (At least romantic classic "Kiss the Girl" has better staging.)
Director Rob Marshall, Chicago aside, usually bungles movie musicals—sorry, Mary Poppins Returns and Into the Woods and Nine, which have their moments, but generally flounder. Here, though, he manages to keep the bland aquamarine sogginess of his underwater visuals out of the way of the focus on the simple fairy tale logic and that core of emotion. Bailey’s Ariel carries it, partly because she gets that great number to get us caring, and partly because she is able to bring something like an inner life to her mute longing. Besides, the new screenplay by David Magee (of Life of Pi), when not dutifully redoing the original, has done some reasonably smart balancing, using a longer run time to flesh out the role of Prince Eric and the kingdom on land a bit. He’s now an explorer, too, and his interests harmonize well with Ariel’s. We can see all the more fully why they’re meant for each other—a good thing, too, since the movie runs nearly a full hour longer than the original. If we’re going to spend more time with it, we might as well believe it. I was brought along by the sturdy structure, and, when Ariel finally finds a way to be part of our world, well, I’m not made of stone.
Showing posts with label Rob Marshall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rob Marshall. Show all posts
Monday, May 29, 2023
Friday, December 26, 2014
Uses of Enchantment: INTO THE WOODS
After over a decade of box office success with revisionist
fairy tales of one sort (Shrek) or
another (Snow White and the Huntsman)
or another (Maleficent), I suppose it
was about time Hollywood got around to adapting Stephen Sondheim’s original
Grimm mashup, Into the Woods. That
musical, co-written with James Lapine, was first produced in 1986. It took
long enough for something so cinematic and imaginative as this series of head-on
collisions between a variety of classic tales made it to the screen. Perhaps
the delay was simply how much further the material takes its revisionist
impulses, to a place darker and more destabilizing to the very idea of fairy
tales than those others dare.
Disney, no stranger to wonderful fairy tales, but rarely willing
to overtly dig down dark, has brought the stage to the screen with director Rob
Marshall, whose Chicago put a layer
of dreamy glitz on a sordid murder musical. The resulting Into the Woods adaptation, scripted by Lapine with music
supervision by Sondheim, gets at what’s most provocative about the story, stripping
away layers of feel-good fantasy while attempting to still let some sentimental
magic in around the edges. It’s a partial equivocation to crowd pleasing in a
more conventional sense, pulling back from a few of the nastier moments, but
remains admirably committed to being a big feel-bad musical, a bunch of great
lyrics and melody with a bittersweet aftertaste.
The opening sets a collection of familiar characters –
Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack who
will have the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) – off
on their recognizable stories. The first twist is placing them all in the same
world, crossing paths, each story’s simple patterns trailing ripple effects through
the others’. The second twist is a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily
Blunt), childless because of a witch (Meryl Streep) and her curse, heading out
into the woods to get the curse reversed. The ingredients they must collect: a
cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair yellow as corn, and a
slipper pure as gold. This quest brings them into direct conflict with the
other plotlines, further complicating simple tales.
By the midpoint, every story has reached its happy ending,
everyone happily married off or with child or rich. The only people disfigured
or blinded are wicked stepsisters. But then the real story begins, revealing
happily ever after to be short lived. Their wishes have been granted, and yet
their lives are no easier, and choices they made to get there have unintended consequences.
The easy morality of fairy tales leaves these characters unprepared for
dissatisfaction, revenge, abandonment, infidelity, and death. That’s the sour
note of real life infecting giddy childhood fantasy. And so the movie follows
suit, buzzing with clever Grimm knottiness for an hour before tipping over into
sadness and upsetting developments. Sondheim’s play is about the limits of life
lessons gleaned from these tales, and how destabilizing it can be to feel alone
in the world without easy answers to guide you.
The movie version gets there, but it’s by its very nature
flashier, cutting between storylines quickly and inelegantly, making an
occasional jumble out of its various strands. Trims to the plot, especially in
the back half, foreshorten motivations and rush the revelations. But there are
smaller miscues of editing. Early on we’re told about a prince, singular,
throwing a festival. Then a few cuts later, we meet a prince, a different one.
In the last third, two characters die in different ways, presented so obliquely
it may as well be off screen. Their fates aren’t clear until other characters
tell us later. One literally falls out of frame, later revealed to have been a
fatal plunge from a cliff, not a trip over a branch as one could reasonably
assume.
Stumbles of staging aside, there’s a fine patina of fakery
to it all. The woods never feel like a real place, just a soundstage. I didn’t
mind it much. The set has its
charms and Marshall finds real emotional engagement between his actors that
enlivens the glittering falsehoods around them. Corden and Blunt’s bakers are
especially good, with breezy repartee and excellent timing. Kendrick’s charming
as always, this time as a flustered indecisive young woman. These three are the
heart of the picture, shouldering the burden of the tonal shifts while Streep
hams it up howling and cackling in the background as the witch goads the
stories forward. Elsewhere, there’s room for small but juicy comic parts played
with aplomb by Chris Pine, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp, Lucy
Punch, and more. They’re welcome flavoring to this world.
Marshall steps out of his cast’s way and lets them spill
forth with Sondheim’s delectable wordplay, rhyming, punning, and clattering
with all manner of delightful alliterations that trip off the tongue and sweet
simple poetic constructions that sit pleasantly on the ear. The big musical
moments land because of the writing, and the skill with which the performers
feel it. These little moments, aching with yearning and surprise, work wonders.
But the big picture doesn’t cohere in the way it should. The story’s pacing’s
off and the staging imprecise, but the hopeful bittersweet conclusion is
affecting, even if the remaining pieces feel a tad forced to fit. Masterpieces
of one medium rarely retain that status in the leap to another. That Into the Woods is a good movie, but not
a great one, is only a minor disappointment.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES
In 2003, when Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer released Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, they had the element of surprise on their side. They had a hugely enjoyable crowd-pleaser, and a pirate film, no less, based on a theme park ride, an idea that then (and now) sounds improbable. Yet the film worked with its big rollicking set pieces, it’s playful treatment of the iconography of swashbuckling (Errol Flynn might have fit right in), and its lilting off-kilter star-turn from Johnny Depp as the instant breakout hit character Captain Jack Sparrow.
As a drunken, improvisatory scoundrel who loves being a pirate more than anything other than his own cleverness, Depp’s mumbling, mascara-wearing, stumbling swordsman was an unlikely hero. Hindsight, however, makes it all seem so inevitable. Depp can be a charming actor and in the film he’s given an infinitely charming character that he not only inhabits but also seems to have emerged fully created from deep within himself. He’s the secret genius amongst all of the characters, able to play people off of each other to achieve his goals while trying (or seemingly trying) to avoid doing the hard work. All he wants to do is to captain his beloved ship and he effortlessly steals away the show in the process, even if he’s actually a bit of a supporting character to the overarching damsel/hero romance between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.
The pure charm and excitement (not to mention the surprise) was dampened with a second feature, Dead Man’s Chest. With the sequel Disney via Verbinski attempted an expansion of the mythos of the first film that tried to retroactively turn that film into a trilogy starter. It’s nothing more than two-and-a-half hours of exposition with a few sequences of fun thrown in for good measure. It is, however, a booming, cluttered messy film of impressive, immersive design that is occasionally very enjoyable. It successfully moves the first film away from a standalone plot and puts it in a larger universe of details and characters engaged in and rebelling against various interconnected curses and codes.
By the time the trilogy ended with At World’s End, I enjoyed diving into the complicated, overextended, multilayered plotting. At three hours, the film is no quick, breezy blockbuster but Verbinski uses its heft to find voluminous weirdness almost hallucinatory in their meticulously odd construction. (There’s a lengthy sequence involving a topsy-turvy trip into Davy Jones’s Locker of all things, not to mention the climax that kicks off when a voodoo giant bursts into a river of crabs). Some find it tiresome; I find it exhilaratingly dense in its commitment to seeing just how odd a summer tent-pole release can get, how light on its feet a film can be while lumbering around with so many subplots and side characters.
After some time off, Disney has Depp back for more time as Captain Jack. By this point, he’s the clear backbone of the series. In this new film, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, he’s just about all that remains of the old mythos. The scene-stealer has become the focus. Most of the ensemble accrued over the course of three films has been stripped away. (Say goodbye to Bloom, Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, and others). This is a simpler film, the simplest of all these Pirates, but it has some of the old pleasures without being nearly as bizarre or intricate. The biggest pleasure of these movies has been their denseness; this one's biggest flaw is it's relatively straightforward nature. It’s comparatively thin and, by the end, a bit anticlimactic; it’s eventful, but less epic in scope. Part of the fun of the bloat has been lost in the new focus on leanness, but I still found just enough to enjoy.
When Johnny Depp makes his entrance, I realized yet again what fun it is to see him as Jack Sparrow. I had forgotten how enjoyable he is to watch, the charmer, scamp, wobbly drunk and perpetual schemer. He commands the screen with ease. Here he’s positioned as the star of the show; he’s playing second fiddle to no one. What works, however, is the way he’s pulled into a plot that both could and couldn’t go on without him. In an opening sequence in London, he impersonates a judge, flees, is caught, and ends up in front of babbling fool King George (Richard Griffiths) who implores him to help his privateer (none other than Sparrow’s long-time rival, Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa) beat the Spanish to the Fountain of Youth.
This race to the fountain will be going on without Sparrow, but so many of the principal players seem to think he knows the way that he ends up accidentally helping out. But that’s Sparrow for you. He has a way of playing all sides against each other in a way that seems like he’d rather be anywhere else than amongst such intricate scheming. By not seeming to care (actually, he just might not care) he wriggles his way out of each situation, usually with the upper hand.
Captain Jack won’t help Barbossa and instead strikes off on his own and gets tricked into working aboard Blackbeard’s ship. This glowering baddie (played growly by Ian McShane) and his fiery long-lost daughter (Penélope Cruz) are foils for Jack’s half-planned bumbling. The daughter, especially, has it out for Jack, but mostly because years earlier she was all set to become a nun until she had an affair with him. On Blackbeard’s ship is also a captive missionary (Sam Claflin), just because there needs to be someone younger around to fall for a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) who gets captured to provide a tear with which to activate the magic of the fountain’s water.
So, the whole thing’s a race (though a fairly rudderless one) and a somewhat overcomplicated quest. Gone are the elaborate curses and multitude of side characters from the first three Pirates. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who’ve actually scripted all four of these things) are trying something new, plotwise. It more or less worked for me, although some of the action beats fall flat (swordplay isn't always edited for clarity or even impact) and the whole thing feels a little overstretched. But the cast is fully on board with the loud fantasy of it all and the proceedings don’t swallow them up. (Rush even does a fantastic bit of acting that involves readjusting his balance after he loses a bit of weight from one leg).
Speaking of new, the director this time around is Rob Marshall. He’s no Verbinski, but he handles the spectacle well. His 2002 film Chicago is, despite what Oscar might say, no Best Picture, but fun enough I suppose. This success had the unfortunate effect of causing him to think that he should be making Very Important Movies. His hollow Memoirs of a Geisha and god-awful Nine are a one-two punch in which he pushed his filmmaking to the limits of insufferableness and beyond. Here he finds his inner showman and stages the swordplay and effects with a degree of competency he has heretofore never displayed. (No, not even in the Academy Award winning Chicago).
Of course, that’s because Marshall is swallowed up in the machine. Bruckheimer and Disney are making product and while someone like Verbinski (take another look at this year’s Rango and you can see the kind of distinct vision he can have) could in some ways assert his own identity as a filmmaker, Marshall is just a cog. No one would let him mess this up too badly. There’s a sense that this movie could almost have churned itself out. But not quite. There’s a small wit and the occasional nice visual staging going on (the 3D is even used strikingly at times) and the action beats arrive on time. Some, like the series of escapes at the film’s opening and, later, a ship’s bewitched rigging tangling up mutineers, are done with a likable, unexpected, flourish.
The movie’s not great (I doubt the series will ever be as good as the original, and not just for lack of surprise) but it’s fun. Definitely not for those already tired of the series or cynical about this one’s very existence, it’s at least not too insistent about your approval. It’s sufficiently good-natured (relaxed, even) and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a film I was fully prepared to find unnecessary. Every buckle gets swashed (leaving lots of dangling plot lines for future installments) with a degree of energy that can make for a pleasant night at the movies.
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