Bursting with red blood and black humor, Tim Burton’s
Sweeney Todd starts out rough. As in: “Ah, shit.” Or:
“Oh, right—this is why I hate musicals!”
Nice one, Tim: By starting Sweeney Todd with one of the
film’s worst musical numbers, you’ve ensured that a ton of people are
going to ask for their money back five minutes after the opening
credits. Like much of Stephen Sondheim’s music for Sweeney Todd,
the first number is terrible, but give Burton some time: Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street eventually transcends its
goofy Broadway roots to become Burton’s best film since Ed
Wood.
A darkly funny story of outcasts in Victorian London, Sweeney
Todd is custom built for Burton’s cartoonishly macabre style. Here,
Burton’s subjects look like they usually do (bleached skin, unkempt
hair, sunken eyes), and their histories are appropriately mopey:
Jerkhole Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) imprisons barber Benjamin Barker
(Johnny Depp) so that he can steal Barker’s wife. Years later,
Barker—now calling himself Sweeney Todd—returns to London
to kill Turpin. But things don’t go according to plan, and soon, the
simultaneously intense and silly barber (he’s got a holster for his
straight razor!) is slashing the throat of any poor bastard who’s dumb
enough to ask for a shave.
Todd’s barbershop, luckily, sits above the bakery of Mrs. Lovett
(Helena Bonham Carter), who’s kind enough to turn all those bodies into
delicious meat pies. Throw in a few excellently cast supporting
characters—namely, rival barber Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) and
evil henchman Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall)—and you’ve got a
solid cast and some mostly solid material.
With a sneering snarl borrowed from Johnny Rotten, the
always-excellent Depp brings a cruel vigor to Sondheim’s cheesy songs,
but Carter steals the show as the nasty (yet heartwarmingly
sympathetic!) Mrs. Lovett. Sweeney Todd‘s best characters are
pathetic degenerates—miserable, mean, and desperate for things
that they cannot have—and the film works best when Burton
balances the material’s cynicism, humor, and melodrama. In bursts,
even—as he’s sending his camera reeling down London’s grimy,
labyrinthine streets, or as he’s splattering the screen with
Technicolor arterial sprays—one senses Burton’s more inspired
than he’s been in a while. But then a crappy song will ruin everything.
Yes, Sweeney Todd is good, and fun, and sinister—but it’d
be better if, every time a showtune started blaring, one didn’t start
to wonder how much better it could have been.
