With Tim Burton at the helm, the emphasis on blood and gore in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in this long-awaited adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical masterpiece as expected, is very high. In fact, from the opening credits, the film literally drips with blood. It falls from the skies over a London so dark and foul it might even make old Scrooge pause. But unlike The Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow, Burton’s most recent goth movies, Sweeney Todd’s story of doomed romance and revenge is so perfectly suited to Burton’s gloomy yet enticing sensibilities that it cannot fail to land.
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Pictured: Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd.
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Welded to Sondheim’s exquisite score, even in this truncated form, is a perfect meeting of director and material. The movie rests on the performances of Johnny Depp in the title role and Helena Bonham Carter, to be sure, but it’s the intersection of Burton with Sondheim’s doom-and-gloom score that is the real triumph—a veritable match made in hell. The result is a (pardon the pun) bloody good time for young and old, and one that goths and show-tune queens alike can embrace.
The story follows the former Benjamin Barker, now re-dubbed Sweeney Todd (Depp), who has returned to London after escaping a false imprisonment at the hands of the nefarious Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his evil henchman, the Beadle (Timothy Spall). Turpin coveted Sweeney’s beautiful wife and, to get her, had Sweeney imprisoned. The wife— gravely used by the judge—poisoned herself and now Turpin has Sweeney’s grown-up daughter in his clutches, with plans to marry her. With the aid of the amoral Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter), who runs a meat-pie establishment above where his barber shop used to stand, Sweeney goes about getting his horrible revenge. While Sweeney awaits a chance to get at Turpin, he and Mrs. Lovett hatch a dastardly plan: Using the gleaming razors (‘My Friends’) that Lovett has hidden away, Sweeney will kill a batch of black-hearted Londoners, who Lovett will then bake in her pies. A reconfigured barber chair which shoots bodies through a trapdoor down to the cellar ingeniously helps the plot along.
A subplot involves Anthony, the young sailor (Jamie Campbell Bower) who has fallen for Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), who he has glimpsed through a window at Judge Turpin’s. There’s also the Italian barber, Signor Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), to contend with but mainly we’re concerned with Todd and Lovett—the evil duo at the center of the film (and who are made up to look like silent-film stars or human panda bears) and sing lustfully of their rapacious desires—briefly, as all the songs have been trimmed and the chorus numbers jettisoned. To shore up Depp’s pleasant and resonate tenor singing and Bonham Carter’s whispered vocals, Burton has cast lesser-trained voices in the other parts and downplayed the score’s operatic qualities. Mood is all here and the songs move quickly around the fantastic, cramped, inky dark sets (by Dante Ferretti). The color palette is so dark it’s almost like seeing a movie of charcoal drawings. (The film’s breathtaking cinematography is by Dariusz Wolski.)
I’m a huge fan of the stage version but the shortened songs didn’t bother me as the atmosphere is so overpowering here. The vocal deficits of the cast, on the other hand, are harder to overlook; both Pretty Women and Not While I’m Around, two of the score’s most achingly beautiful songs, are not the expected highlights, though they are aided (as is the entire score) by Joanathan Tunick’s gorgeous orchestrations. Going with a younger cast also has its advantages—the freshness of Anthony and Johanna is quite believable (they seem like high school kids) and really ups the sexual tension between Sweeney and Lovett. Bonham Carter’s cleavage almost spills over her dress into those meat pies and Depp wields his phallic symbol razors like a man possessed.
I’m not sure how mainstream audiences are going to take to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This isn’t exactly Hairspray, you know. Will the gore and creepy atmosphere and golden goose Johnny Depp be enough for musical-phobic crowds? Will show-tune queens forgive Burton for butchering Sondheim’s score (even with Sondheim’s help) in order to keep the running time down to two hours? No matter how these questions get answered, however, it’s hard to argue that this is yet another enthralling derring-do between Burton and Depp—perhaps their strongest pairing to date.
Mike Nichols’ latest film, Charlie Wilson’s War (with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin), is being sold by the star power of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and the incongruities of the story that the movie loosely reenacts: A playboy Texan Congressman joined forces with a mega-rich blond bombshell—another Texan—in the early ’80s to arm Afghan rebels and defeat Russian forces, thus ending Communism in that war-torn country.
One would expect the star wattage of the two leads, aided by thick accents and character eccentricities (not to mention a big ‘ole bouffant for Roberts) to be incredibly, tantalizingly high, but instead it only burns fitfully. Scenes that would have increased caring about these two seem to have been cut while the ironies in the story don’t really seem so off-the-wall, considering the effect Texas conservatives have had on American politics the last seven years. The picture just sort of bumps along in a fairly entertaining manner, light in tone but not particularly involving. Only a visit to a Darfur-like refuge camp and each appearance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a scrappy CIA operative (who has a great opening rant and then never lets up) have the effect of drawing you back into the movie—temporarily.
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