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It’s hard to imagine anyone other than director Tim Burton bringing Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street to the big screen. With its grisly theme and gruesome goings-on, the story a perfect match for the filmmaker’s own dark sensibilities. Everything you’d expect from a Burton film is here: outcasts whose behavior skirts and sometimes leaps the bounds of sanity, dark deeds laced with black humor, a stunning production design and, of course, Johnny Depp. However, what’s often missing from the director’s work — a truly compelling story — is, fortunately, included in this mix. Credit John Logan, who delivers a crisp, taut adaptation of Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Broadway classic; the script quickly sets up an engaging premise and then flies from one compelling scene to the next to bring us a classic example of Grand Guignol entertainment. Depp is Benjamin Barker, returning to London after spending 15 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He sets out to exact revenge on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), a vile magistrate who coveted Barker’s wife and had Barker sent to jail so that he might have her for his own, and his assistant Beadle Banford (Timothy Spall), an arrogant sadist. Barker soon learns that his wife is dead and that Turpin has taken his daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), as his ward. He’s brought up to speed by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), an old acquaintance who persuades him to resume his former career, barbering, in the rooms above her pie shop and assume the alias of Sweeney Todd so that his return remains a secret. Barker agrees to this plan and sets out to lure his enemies to his shop. He slays an old rival, Signor Aldolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), who threatens to expose his true identity, just to get the hang of it, and Mrs. Lovett solves the problem of disposing of the corpse by grinding it up and using the meat in her pies, which become a sensation. The violence is presented in an exaggerated manner, and though it’s initially shocking, the later murders are even more extreme and it’s obvious that the theatricality of these actions, not their emotional impact, is what’s important to Burton. Before the end, blood spurts in fountains across the screen, bodies pile up at a breakneck pace, and one character is incinerated in such a grisly fashion that you look on in wonder rather than horror. There’s an exaggerated comic tone to it all, and Burton’s correct in presenting the violence in this way, lest the whole film be bogged down in a sense of reality that would be too much to endure. That’s not to say that humanity is absent. We’re constantly aware of the abject poverty that Todd, Lovett, and thousands of others combat daily and its effects on them. Many of the barber’s victims have done him no personal harm; their only crime is their position in the upper class. It’s no accident that Todd and Lovett are pale white, for they are the living dead: Their lives have been hard, and their struggle to survive has drained the life from them. The cruelty they’ve endured has left their souls empty and any sense of morality has died as well, leaving them justifying their heinous actions. In the end, this is a story with the eternal class struggle at its foundation, and Todd and Lovett are just as much victims as the people they slaughter are. Depp and Bonham Carter convey this with a sense of poignancy that lends the film an emotional weight, giving humanity to two characters who could have easily been rendered as caricatures. Depp is a surprisingly good singer, staying within his range and delivering his lines with a degree of passion that comes through particularly in his duet with Rickman, “Pretty Women.” Bonham Carter is heartbreaking at times; Lovett wants to escape her life but knows it’s impossible, a notion that’s underscored as she sings “By the Sea” in a musical dream sequence in which she imagines living happily ever after with Todd in a cottage by the ocean. Two people more out of place at the beach you’ve never seen.
Sweeney Todd is a tragic tale of blind, misdirected rage in which those at its center are unable to move past the tragedies that have befallen them and are thus doomed to be victims once more. An exercise in classic musical theater as well as an example of exceptional modern movie design, this is one of the year’s best films, thanks to the work of Depp and Bonham Carter, who allow us to see the broken people beneath the gruesome masks Todd and Lovett have come to wear.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
