If you like stories that begin with “once upon a time” and generally end with “happily ever after,” you may like the movie Into the Woods (2014). Considering 16th century poet Torquato Tasso’s characteristics of good imaginative stories, including good fairytales, Into the Woods is likely to ‘please and instruct’ you. Yet be aware that in this movie musical the beloved Brothers Grimm’s fairytales of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and others are combined to yield at least a mildly troubling, confusing brew, mixing the excitement of wishes and the darkness and dangers of the woods. But if you like the Brothers Grimm’s good-against-evil, you’ll be pleased. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong with Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics. Now, here’s an example of how this movie version of a musical fairytale may fulfill Tasso’s requirement to instruct us. After being freed by a baker with a knife, in this version not the hunter, from the belly of the wicked wolf, Little Red Riding Hood admits to the baker that she has learned the lesson that “nice is not the same as good.” When I heard the cherubic Little Red Riding Hood, with a perfectly sweet disposition, say this, she sounded like she had learned a lesson that too many of us 21st century Americans haven’t learned about the wicked wolf of our human nature. About this, in his book Making Choices, Peter Kreeft says, “… most of people most of us know are ‘nice’ people. Indeed, that adjective is almost always the one we use: ‘Oh, he’s a nice person….’ But being a nice person is not necessarily the same as being a good person, a moral person. To be nice means only to be socially acceptable. The opposite of ‘nice’ is ‘nasty.’ But being good means much more than just not being nasty.” More importantly, C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity says, “’Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing…. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turning away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.” So, thank you, dear Little Red Riding Hood, because you confirm that C.S. Lewis was right in his article titled “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” imdb/title/tt2180411/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 23:08:56 +0000
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