Sweeney Todd
3/5
25 JanuaryBetween the spurting blood, churning human flesh, and snapping necks, Tim Burton’s film of Stephen Sondheim’s musical retelling of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not for the weak of heart, or stomach, for that matter. But more than the special effects, it is the portrayal of a world in which, ‘the lives of the wicked should be cut brief, and for the rest of us, death will be a relief’, that is as disturbing as it is absolutely absorbing.
Near the opening, a half-lit, nearly dead Johnny Depp appears in rags and sings, ‘there’s a hole in the world like a great black pit, and it’s full people who’re full of shit.’ So Sweeney introduces us to his London, a city crawling with venomous men, filthy in body and soul, unyieldingly cruel people who don’t deserve their very lives. In this world, being baked into pies and sold is a fate almost too good for man.
In short, Sweeney Todd may be a musical, but it’s no Andrew Lloyd Webber. While Sondheim has a deft hand with comedy and sentiment, it is in capturing the cruelty, sorrow and degradation of man that he excels. It would be worth paying admission merely to hear his lyrics. But while Sweeney Todd has made audiences’ skin crawl in theatres for years, it is Burton’s deft work that brings the menacing immediacy of the stage production almost flawlessly to the film.
In fact, their shared morbid interest in human depravity is so strong that it’s surprising Burton didn’t make Sweeney Todd earlier. The tale of a barber who returns from abroad to seek revenge on the judge who banished him for life on a false charge is, mostly, a story of the horrifying power of hatred. As Sweeney puts it upon his return, ‘the cruelty of man is as wondrous as Peru.’ As wondrous and, like it or not, as enthralling. Especially since Depp embodies Todd’s character so fully that you cannot pry your eyes away, even when that means witnessing spouts of blood previously unimaginable outside a Tarantino flick.
The film is certainly not without fault. In order to keep tension ratcheted up, Burton stifles many of the score’s more comic and sentimental numbers. ‘The Worst Pies in London,’ and ‘A Little Priest’ are, normally, hilarious songs. But Helena Bonham Carter’s interpretation of Mrs. Lovett, the obsessively devoted pie shop owner who ‘disposes’ of Sweeney’s victims, is too subdued to allow the comedy to shine.
Burton’s consistently dark adaptation instead directs the entire production towards its gruesome and tragic end. Ultimately, while this comes at the sacrifice of much of what makes the stage production delightful, it creates an arresting and magnificent world on film, portraying a view of mankind that will leave you with a bad taste in your mouth for days to come.
by Willa Brown
