There are many fine films to choose from, of course, but I can't help feeling Woods deserves much more attention at the awards level.
Nonetheless, Woods is a remarkable film of depth and beauty, and above all, restraint, given the temptations of showing splashy ballroom and giant's kingdom scenes.
And its diminuendo ending after delving to the depths of human existence is a beautiful end to an exceptional experience on film.
One of the ironies, of course, is that Woods, which sparked two decades of movies which re-thought fairy tales after the stage show suggested what was possible, may have come in after the crest of the wave had broken on the genre of its own making.
But this does not detract from the inherent greatness of the movie. It is full of the spirit of adventure, superbly crafted in every department, thrillingly paced, tremendously witty and heartfelt all at once (I think of just one moment as example: when Little Red's hand reaches and holds the Baker's in humble apology, as she sings '...and we're back at the start', a moment of tenderness unexpected and still perfectly apt.) Like A Midsummer Night's Dream, it takes characters from a stable to an unstable world, but it goes far further than Dream - it enters the realm of King Lear, the greatest and richest of Shakespeare's output. But its claim to a central place in our literature doesn't just depend on possibly simplistic comparisons to Shakespeare; of itself, it establishes its great value as an exploration of the conflict between selfishness, truth and one human's inherent responsibility to another, in terms which are fantastic and emblematic on the one hand, and acutely modern on the other. It speaks not only of how we must be fair and just in our dealings as individuals, but because it is an allegorical tale, it can have application to the way nations deal with nations, and peoples with peoples. "They are not alone" can mean several things, one of which is that a giant has people who love him too; and when we only think of ourselves, we suppress the natural empathy which would tell us of our duty to all people, even, in many circumstances, to 'enemies'.
Regardless of Oscars, though, how wonderful it was to see in the credits of the film, one after another, honoured before vast audiences in cinemas everywhere, the names of those people who have brought so many exhilarating musical moments to us all in the theatre over so many years: Sondheim, Lapine, Tunick, Gemignani. And let's not forget Rob Marshall himself, whose musical staging in Kiss of the Spider Woman alone (the original Harold Prince production) was a miracle of stagecraft all by itself, and was a major achievement in intelligent musical theatre in the 'legit' world.
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