The London of Sweeney Todd is a London I never wish to know: a gray, smoggy, corrupt hive of decadence and deprivation. It is a London as black as the heart of Benjamin Barker, the scorned barber sent to prison on a trumped up charge at the hands of the pious, yet evil Judge Turpin. Escaped and returned, Barker, a.k.a Todd, plans to exact his revenge on Turpin and all of London.
Tim Burton's imagining of the hit Broadway musical is his darkest work to date, and also one of his best. Harnessing the immense powers of his muses Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, he has blended the macabre with the blackly comic into a work of extreme gothic vision, a true work of art. Reigning in his usual artistic flair, he has instead chosen to shape the talents of his two actors and the supreme source material into an angry portrait of love and revenge.
Depp as Sweeney, with crazed hair and ghostly complexion does fine work (though try to ignore his ridiculous accent) as the spiteful demon barber who returns to Fleet Street to cut the throat of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), the man who has taken Sweeney's daughter as his ward, and whom he believes killed his beautiful wife, Lucy. Setting up a shop above Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, he practices his new, bloody art on the unsuspecting patrons of the city with the help of the other tenant, Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter). The two join in a grisly partnership which puts into perspective the old adage "you are what you eat".
It was an ambitious undertaking by Burton to do a musical, especially one normally thought of as a "singer's" musical, but he succeeded exceptionally. Depp has interviewed saying that before his acting career he had intentions of singing for a band, but his voice is by no means something one would put on a stage. Nor is Bonham Carter's, who had had no vocal training prior to this film. However, both of them do their own singing to great effect, taking the theatricality out of the material.
Indeed, I don't believe that anyone but possibly Jayne Wisener who plays Sweeney's daughter, Johanna, would have had much experience in musical theatre, but that gritty realism of their voices does nothing but add to Burton's dark vision of the poor streets of 19th-century London, with all of its Victor Hugo images of poverty and prostitution. Mrs. Lovett explains "times is hard" and certainly that seems to be so.
The complexities of the story are wonderful in all of their gruesomeness, giving a complete, abominable picture of human nature. People deal in misdeeds because they love, they hate, or they are simply out for a quick shilling. The material is justly lauded so the story was nothing to be uncertain about. What was in question was Burton's ability to translate it to the big screen, and to my great relief it is a masterful movie musical.
The artistry of the film is fantastic, as expected. Colleen Atwood's costumes and Dante Ferretti's award-winning art direction is superb. There is a obscene amount of tomato soup-looking blood, but thankfully it helps to lessen what would be almost too horrible were it realistic. It is a nightmare vision, and beautiful to behold.
The work of all actors is great, including a supporting cast of Rickman, Timothy Spall, and a hilarious Sacha Baron Cohen. Bonham Carter steals the show for me, though, whose plays a woman whose love for Sweeney is so strong that it leads her to what I consider the most deplorable acts of the story, though her performance will lend her to being seen as a victim. Her facial expressions are a work of genius.
I would hate to spoil the film so I will end with an enthusiastic urging to you to watch this movie. For those of you who have never seen the musical it will be a rare treat from the campy song and dance musicals of late like "Chicago" and "Hairspray". And for those of you who, like myself, know and love the stage performance, it will be a new and compelling adaptation. Some purists may not like it for what it leaves out, but what it does center on is tremendous. I hope this will not be the last musical adaptation that Burton decides to undertake, and judging from its execution a horror film from him might not go amiss either.
3.5/4
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