I remember seeing this years and years ago at the Moorpark Melodrama in Thousand Oaks, California. Certainly one of the darker musicals you could ever hope to see in your lifetime, but presented in with a light touch (to a certain extent anyway). I got a big kick out of how Sweeney managed to eject the bodies through a small hatch on the stage. I wanted to go through that hatch myself. Keep in mind; I was about 10 years old at the time. After all these years, I still have very vivid memories of the play and having seen it at one of many theaters my parents took me to when I was young. Now we have Tim Burton’s version of the famous musical by Stephen Sondheim which brings to mind a Klingon proverb:
“Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
“Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street” marks the sixth collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, and they are perfectly suited to Sondheim’s dark and tragic tale of a wrongfully accused man who comes back after years in prison with nothing but revenge on his mind. Sweeney, played by Johnny Depp, was a husband and father who was framed by the devious Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) who wants Sweeney’s wife, Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly, although I thought at first it was Kate Hudson), all to himself. Now that Sweeney is back in town, he plans to take his revenge not just on the Judge, but on the “vermin” that inhabit London in general. He does that with the help of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who runs a dreadful pie shop, and she cannot hide how bad her pies taste from even herself. However, as Sweeney takes his bloody revenge (and let me emphasize that it is a very bloody revenge indeed) on his unsuspecting customers, Mrs. Lovett grinds their deceased bodies into meat that she bakes into a new set of pies that suddenly turns her dilapidated restaurant into the biggest hot spot in town. These are unsuspecting customers of a whole other kind.
Suffice to say, both Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett have quite a bit of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in them.
Whereas the Sweeney Todd I saw all those years ago was slightly more innocent, this musical is as bleak as it can possibly be. London is presented as a decaying metropolis of faded colors, drenched in grayness that is never ending. Occasionally, we get an infusion of different colors, but that is in a sequence where we are caught up in the imaginative minds of the characters themselves. This is probably as it should be, as Sondheim’s musical takes a look at the deep and dark heart of vengeance and how it consumes the soul until there is nothing left. It doesn’t matter if the vengeance is justified or not because it robs one of objectivity, and rips your heart apart until there is nothing left but a vicious pit of hate.
I think the direction that the direction that Tim Burton took his vision of “Sweeney Todd” is both brave and uncompromising. It does not hide any of the nastiness of its characters, nor should it. There was a moment where it looked like the studio was going to force Burton to cut this movie down to a PG-13 rating in order to make it more commercially accessible to those who swooned to Depp’s Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” movies. But that would have been ridiculous in regards to the nature of this musical, and I am glad both Burton and the studio which financed and released it stuck to their guns in delivering the version as it was intended to be. There is A LOT of blood in this film, and it almost likes a musical by Dario Argento more than anything else.
“Sweeney Todd” is a triumph of art and set design more than anything else. Everything is created in a way that sucks you into a whole world that you would probably not want to visit under any other circumstances. It looks like no detail was missed in creating the crumbling world of London that mirrors that last shards of Todd’s soul that are about to be forever disappeared. Tim Burton must have had a field day with this, as the majority of his movies look like incredible pieces of art you are lucky enough to see.
Many complain that neither Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham Carter have the chops to pull off the vocal pieces this musical demands as if they were performing it onstage on Broadway. C’mon! This is a movie, not theater, and their voices are just fine here. They each hit their notes just right, and they are very well cast here as is the rest of the cast which was carefully chosen. Among the cast is Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sasha Baron Cohen, and a host of others who you will come to know soon enough.
In some ways, Depp should almost be considered too young for a role like this. Does anyone you know come out of prison looking as hot as he does? But in the end, it doesn’t really matter because he digs into the cold heart of his character with an infinite passion that leaves you convinced that no one else in Hollywood could have pulled this off as well as he. It also offers a nice breath of fresh air after the disappointment that was “Pirates Of The Caribbean – At World’s End.
It would appear that Helena Bonham Carter got this role by default she is quite involved with the film’s director and is the mother of his children. But looking at her performance here and her work overall, it would be unfair to think that at all. She has always been a very accomplished actress in movies like “Wing Of The Dove” among others, and she brilliantly captures the weirdness and longing that is Mrs. Lovett. Together, she and Depp make the perfect pair of vengeful partners that manage to dupe a highly unsuspecting public into become the latest editions to their ever growing menu.
As good as “Sweeney Todd” is, I can’t quite say that I loved it or that it is great. We have had a strong infusion of musicals these past few years from “Evita” to “Moulin Rouge.” This past year gave us one of the most entertaining movie musicals of recent memory, “Hairspray.” All those musicals succeeded in sweeping me up in there respective stories and left me breathless. This one didn’t quite do that for me, but that’s really a minor criticism as there is still a lot to like here.
The fact that this movie is not doing well at the box office is actually a shame considering the amount of work and time it took to put this movie together and promote it to the public. The saddest thing is that the studio may have been correct in saying that a PG-13 rating would have brought this movie a larger audience, however insulting it would be to us movie lovers. But again, I am glad that Burton stuck to his guns here. This is not a movie or a musical that is easily glamorized.
Burton and Depp as a team are to modern day filmmaking what Scorsese and DeNiro were to filmmaking in the 70’s and a good portion of the 80’s. Here’s hoping that they work together again really soon.
