Sweeney Todd vs. Into The Woods: Two Approaches To Film Adaptation

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I have been given to understand that I am somewhat outspoken in my love for the 2007 Tim Burton adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Whatever your complaints (and I've heard them before, I guarantee it), I would like us to set them aside for a moment and consider the movie as an adaptation alone.

Consider, for example, the controversial decision to entirely excise the chorus numbers. One might immediately presume this to be a measure taken against implausibility and staginess, but it actually serves a larger thematic purpose in the movie. The Tim Burton filmography is almost entirely about alienation, and Sweeney Todd is no exception. You can see this in the make-up work, where the gaunt and skull-like circles around the eyes are granted to those in Sweeney's sphere who have succumbed to madness. Toby, for instance, is not given the gaunt eyes until his very last scene - the one in which (SPOILER, I suppose) he cuts Sweeney's throat.

The decision to cut the chorus numbers extends this theme. The music and the related compulsion to sing is re-framed as a product - or perhaps an expression - of the madness inherent in the main characters. Where the Hal Prince interpretation emphasized the universality of inter-human predation and framed Sweeney's crimes as an extension of the callous disregard for life in an over-industrialized society, Burton pares back the story. He makes it less socially relevant, true, but at the same time more intimate and personally affecting.

For a film adaptation, this is - at least in my view - entirely the right choice. In a medium in which the camera can precisely focus on whatever specific element the director demands and capture micro-expressions that would be imperceptible on the stage, taking a sweeping story and making it tight and close is a choice that perfectly suits the medium into which the work is being transferred.

In short, Sweeney Todd serves as an excellent example of how to adapt a musical to film with a keen eye on the comparative advantages of each medium. By way of contrast, then, let us compare this approach to that used in the recent film adaptation of Into The Woods.

As I explained in my review at the time, I did not think the movie was particularly bad. The source material is just so good that you would really have to go far out of your way to make it unwatchable, after all. However, I also criticized the approach of the adaptation with a metaphor that I would like to elaborate on somewhat here.

The adaptation of Into The Woods is characterized not by any major additions, chronological fiddling, augmentations, or what have you, but instead by its omissions. Say a certain scene has to be cut for time. In that case, the subplot that the scene in question resolves must be cut in its entirety. If this cannot be done without destroying the main plot, then a more disposable subplot must be found. If you are going to cut the resolution of the Witch's arc, then you must also cut Rapunzel's death. If you are going to cut the Narrator and the Old Man for reasons of staginess, then you also have to cut "No More." You must cut precisely the right scenes in order to maintain the basic structural integrity of the piece as a whole.

In short, this adaptation treats the story like a Jenga tower. The trick is to pull out precisely the right blocks so that the whole edifice does not collapse.

Which, while I recognize that it's probably necessary in this case given just how complicated the plot of Into The Woods can get, I would assert is entirely the wrong way of going about it.

While I hope this does not require reiteration, I may as well repeat it here: the cinema and the stage are separate mediums with separate demands, and a good adaptation of one to the other requires heavy alteration of the source. If that alteration "ruins" the story, then maybe that work should not have been adapted in the first place, which is also a possibility that I think the entertainment industry doesn't consider nearly enough.

But in any case, whatever your reservations might be about Helena Bonham-Carter's singing, Sweeney Todd stands alongside the likes of Fosse's Cabaret as a shining example of how to do a stage-to-screen adaptation right by rebuilding rather than just reducing the source.

Limerick Review: Jurassic World

So they'll give this concept one more try,
Paving over the people who died,
And you all have a shot
At predicting the plot.
To the point where you have to ask "why?"

But this time, instead of just gore
And thrills that we've all seen before,
The audience demands
More to fill up the stands,
So they make a huge new dinosaur.

This obvious meta-commentary
Is also supposed to be scary.
But with the same plot for us
As III's Spinosaurus,
The whole thing just feels a bit airy.

Howard's Claire is put-upon
Efficient, calm, and withdrawn,
Until she gets saddled
By her sister, brain-addled,
With her own set of ill-behaved spawn.

The movie takes a sexist turn,
As Claire's childlessness is spurned.
The brats are most skilled
At almost getting killed,
And yet she has something to learn.

The younger kid, despite my rage,
Recalls my own dinosaur stage.
And in spite of his blunder,
His huge sense of wonder
Neatly mirrors my own at that age.

But then, I continue to whinge
About the Chris Pratt cliche binge.
He's perfect and right,
An uber-macho knight,
And the "alpha" line made me cringe.

The plot tries to start, on a whiz,
A romance that lacks any fizz.
It just undermines
To have so many lines
About how far below him she is.

But it's all an ill-conceived blend.
One scene has a person contend
That "nature vs. tech"
Is a whole bunch of dreck,
Which the film's forgotten by the end.

And then we're given Claire's P.A.
Who we don't see for most of the day,
And whose return is soured
When she is devoured
In an oddly unpleasant way.

So many plot points that it's hittin'
With resolutions it's omittin'.
Which makes sense, once you glean
Each CG set-piece scene
Was started before it was written.

It has many flaws to redress,
But it's not smart enough to transgress.
The problem is not
Any evil it's got,
But that the whole thing is a mess.

Why Pacific Rim Should Have Been A Comic

Let's talk about Pacific Rim. I love this movie, and the thing that makes it for me is the world-building, the amount of thought that went into how this fictional world and its alternate history timeline would run.

But here is the thing: I missed most of that when I first saw it in theaters. Judging by what I have heard from most people who saw it, even people who loved it right from the start, they missed most of that element when first they saw it.

The question, then, becomes how this could have been avoided. In order to find an answer to that, we have to talk about world-building.

World-building is a bit of a peculiar beast. As I may have mentioned at some point before, world-building is best suited to the novel format because the novel - and, to a large though by no means equal extent, the graphic novel - is one of the very few mediums in which the reader-viewer-consumer-whatever has a great deal of control over the pace at which they read it. 

And so, for example, if you have something requiring a lot of world-building, you are going to be depending a lot on exposition. The most obvious advantage of the novel for this purpose is that you can deliver exposition in narration much more easily than in dialogue because you are already explicitly explaining things to the reader. 

You can't do that in film or theatre because in those formats your text is restricted to dialogue, and it is difficult to find an excuse for one character to explain to another character the kinds of concepts that the explainee really should already understand if they inhabit this fictional world. So there is an inevitable problem faced by films that novels solve just by their nature.

So because novels necessitate narration and description, they are very good at conveying the heavy exposition you need for world-building. The most important thing is still pace. If you read a paragraph in a novel and didn't understand it, you can just quickly cast your eyes back to the beginning of the paragraph without breaking flow, whereas if you miss a crucial line of dialogue in a film, then even if you are fortunate enough to be watching it at home, you still have to go through he rigmarole of pressing the rewind button and taking it far enough back to give it context and then watching it again in hopes that the second time around you will have slightly more idea what is going on. Crucially, this breaks flow. It breaks the ease with which the consumer of the media is able to consume the content. 

You don't have that problem in books or comics because you can very easily go back to something you missed without having to break flow. Which means that not only is it easier to integrate exposition, that exposition is also more easily understood because it can be painlessly repeated at the reader's discretion. 

Again, this all falls under the banner of the reader controlling the pace.The book only continues if you continue reading it, and it continues at your pace, which makes the delivery of exposition that world-building hinges on so much easier.

And that brings be back to Pacific Rim, which in many ways suffers from being a film. The prologue is well-shot and visually dynamic, but has to resort to 5-10 minutes of straight expostion dump in voice-over narration, conveying information that would have been much more easily dispatched in a book or, preferably, a comic - a lot of the world-building is in the design work, after all. 

But a strong indicator of this fact is how much the movie benefits from being watched on DVD, where you can notice more with each repetition, pause it for closer observation, pick through the meticulously constructed visual design. That is to say, if you watch it at the pace at which the movie delivers it, a lot of it will just pass you by because the information is not being delivered at a pace that works for you. 

The movie has to keep a fairly brisk pace, so it ends up whistling by a lot of material that we might have preferred to linger on and that might have enhanced the world-building.

Thus you run into really rather odd situations, like Coyote Tango, which was clearly meticulously designed, and they put out action figures for it, and you look at all the work that went into it and then in the film you only ever really see it in silhouette. You never see the thing in action, and you certainly never see the design in the film itself.

That is really the whole issue in a nutshell. You have this artifact that a lot of work went into, and that is really cool once you have the luxury of getting into the details, but you don't get to appreciate it in the moment because the mandatory pacing of film demands that you pass right by it on the way to the next part of the story.

Thus the film becomes an experience that you can only fully get if you watch it multiple times, creating a passable simulation of the pacing control you would get in a book or comic.

The Talking Picture, Ep. 18 - The Allegory of the Floop, A Limerick Sequence

The Talking Picture, Ep. 14 - Remaking Continuity, A Limerick Sequence