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.

On Planting and Paying Off in The Avengers

A lot of making your story structure feel complete and crystalline is the successful implementation of plant-and-payoff. There are some writers like James Cameron, Joss Whedon, and Christopher Nolan who are very good at this plant-and-payoff pattern. Then there are the other writers and stories - and let's just use the example of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, which is just riddled with instances where it tries to manufacture plant and pay off by just repeating more or less random bits of dialogue from earlier and hoping that it will have acquired some sort of significance in the interim. 

But as far as this goes, one of the things about this that people often get wrong is you have to set it up properly. There was a Cinema Sins video on The Avengers that didn't get this. 

Cinema Sins is a video series that consistently manages to list every problem that doesn't matter, every little niggle that does not actually affect the dramatic impact of the movie. In this case, for some reason, it pointed out that Captain America had made good on a bet that he had never explicitly agreed to, and when it said that I wanted to rend my hair from my head, because that's the f***ing point you moron. Of course they didn't agree on it because that would be telegraphing the plant, that would have told the audience that this is going to get paid off at some point, leaving us counting the seconds until the payoff finally arrives. 

That was actually one of the best examples of plant-and-payoff in the movie, because it establishes the plant in such a way that when it does get paid off, everyone remembers the setup but at the time no one would have known if and how that first line might come up again.That is more or less an ideal execution of plant-and-payoff. The setup is a good and quippy enough line that it stands on its own, but at the same time memorable enough that when we see the callback some half hour later, we all get it.

The other extreme, as I mentioned, is Alice in Wonderland - the Tim Burton version - which tries to turn Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk into a plant-and-payoff, which doesn't work because the phrase has no relevance to story, theme, or character. Lewis Carroll originally included it precisely because it was a non sequitur. The movie does this a lot, and it just doesn't work because they are basically just picking out random lines of dialogue and hoping that the audience will find something of staggering brilliance in the phrase that was not immediately apparent the first time. But whatever.

I admit you have to walk a bit of a tightrope to make this work, not being so overt that the audience makes you immediately, but not using just any old line either. The latter is important not only because getting it wrong devalues any future use of the technique elsewhere in the film, but more significantly because at its best, plant-and-payoff speaks to some larger theme or arc in the film. 

The Captain America plant-and-payoff reinforces Cap's character as scrupulously honorable, but also serves to underline the grandeur of the spectacle by showing us that Captain America is as amazed by the reveal of the helicarrier as we are. In James Cameron's Avatar, we are very clumsily invited to marvel at the scenery. Michelle Rodriguez says "You should see your faces" as the cast stare dumbly at a green screen. The Cap example is all the more resonant for its silence. All the talking was done in the plant, so the payoff doesn't need dialogue. Gold star.