Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/23/07
Few filmmakers are more of
a brand name than Tim Burton: his name is as inextricably tied to
a signature style as those of Hitchcock, Ford or Lucas. His films'
Gothic wackiness and sympathy for society's freaks and outcasts come coated
in a gooey layer of playfully Grand Guignol, but in a career spent making
big-budget blockbusters, his style is often at war with his subject matter.
Are Batman Returns' Bruce Wayne and The Penguin even in the same
movie? And how about the way Mars Attacks! divides its' characters
into two groups and showers unconditional love on one while pummeling the
other with candy colored sadism? I've long regarded Ed Wood
as the one truly perfect Burton movie, so totally immersed in the Bizarro
world of the 50's schlock filmmaker and his peculiar friends that it has
no struggle at all between Hollywood characters and Burton characters.
Now he's found a second property for which his signature style is absolutely
attuned. In 1973, British playwright Christopher Bond updated the
19th century legend of murderous barber Sweeney Todd to include a sympathetic
backstory. Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Hugh Wheeler (book)
adapted this adaptation for the Broadway stage in 1979. And now Burton's
brought it to the big screen as a sensationally demented swirl of murder,
madness, music, and, of course, Johnny Depp.
A ship brings two men to
1840's London. One, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) is a young
man bursting at the seams with a love of adventure. The other calls
himself Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp), but he is in fact Benjamin Barker,
who 15 years earlier was jailed for a crime he did not commit so evil Judge
Turpin (Alan Rickman) could steal his wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly).
Todd returns to his former shop and meets Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter),
who tells him the story of how his wife poisoned herself, leaving their
daughter a ward of the lustful judge. Now an adult, Johanna (Jayne
Wisener) is locked away in his mansion as he prepares to “protect her virtue”
by marrying her. One day, Anthony walks by the mansion and sees her
through the window: it's love at first sight. As he schemes
to break her out, Todd makes plans to get the Judge in his barber's chair
and slash his throat. But when that simple goal proves elusive, his
madness takes aim at other targets: every last citizen of London,
whose dead bodies are ground up into meat pies to be sold in Mrs. Lovett's
shop below...
What makes Sweeney Todd
a uniquely Burton-friendly property is that its' story contains virtually
nothing but madness and depravity. We get a few quick flashbacks
to the happy time before Barker ran afoul of the Judge, but that is all
in Sweeney Todd's past long before we meet him. Depp is sensational
in the role, commanding the screen with the fury of his vengeful need to
strike back at... anyone. Fans who've missed his more adult edge
while he's been making kid's movies will be delighted to see the ferocity
with which he does everything from swing that razor to simply squint.
Madness grips Mrs. Lovett just as hard, as it would have to if you're going
to be in love with such a lunatic. Bonham Carter is always very,
very good when she's bad and this role is no exception, but she's also
skillful at mixing in a pathetic, hopeful quality that makes it hard to
know until the very end whether this psycho baker is evil or just along
with Sweeney's crazy ride. I loved the “By the Sea” musical number
where she muses about how happy the two of them will be some day while
we watch her frolic about in a colorful fantasy world as he drably follows
behind, the look of hateful determination never leaving his face.
Just as mad in his own way
is the Judge, played by Rickman as another essay in evil, driven by a quiet
perversity that comes out only in whispers as he bellows harsh punishments
from his bench. It's hard to think of a man who deserves a sterner
throat-slashing. Timothy Spall, the old-school madman of the moment,
oozes corruption as his lackey Beadle Bramford, and Sacha Baron Cohen is
actually able to bring off both the outsized charisma and the quiet scheming
of famous barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli, Todd's first victim. You
know your movie's dark and crazy when its' most virtuous character is a
gin-swilling little kid, but Ed Sanders is first-rate as Toby, the child
laborer who comes to work in the pie shop and slowly begins to suspect
the truth. Anthony is supposed to be the old-school Broadway Virtuous
Hero, but, honestly, the way he falls so hard for Johanna without even
meeting her is only slightly less creepy than the Judge's attentions.
Still, Bower and Wisener do the best they can with underwritten roles.
The Sondheim musical numbers
are just as good as advertised, packing humor, pathos and barking madness
into fairly catchy tunes. Luckily, you don't need to be a great singer
to do them justice either, and Depp and Bonham Carter act the songs as
much as they sing them. First rate Art Direction and Costume Design
bring to life the most utterly diseased London I've ever seen on film,
from Todd's clothes that look like someone was buried in them to Lovett's
pie shop, which crawls with bugs even as she churns out some of the most
unappetizing pies ever (made from appalling-looking “meat”)... at least
until she discovers her “secret ingredient”. Which brings us to...
The Gore. Surely Sweeney
Todd is as bloody, as gruesome, and as absolutely R-rated as every
other musical ever made put together. Everything about the person-to-pie
process is perfectly designed to be both shockingly grotesque and kinda
funny, from the brutally graphic throat-slashings complete with spurting
blood to the angle at which a trap door slides the customers off their
chairs and down onto their heads on the hard floor below and finally to
the giant meat grinder filled with people parts that churns out generically
tasty-looking Ground Us.
Between Bond, Wheeler and
screenwriter John Logan, the story maintains a ferocious momentum throughout,
keeping a person from thinking too hard about... well, that would be telling.
Suffice it to say that we learn an important lesson about the blind pursuit
of vengeance that Sweeney Todd is too far gone to understand before we
ever lay eyes upon him.
And orchestrating it all
is Burton, perfectly at home in the filthiest London ever with a cast of
madmen. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
continues the recent strong run of movie musicals in its' own, totally
unique way. No Oklahoma! here: just feel lucky if you
don't find a finger in your popcorn... |
