SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
DreamWorks-Paramount Pictures/ Warner Bros. Pictures
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B
Directed by: Tim Burton
Written By: John Logan, based on the musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler from an adaptation of “Sweeney Todd” by Christopher Bond
Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jayne Wisner, Jamie Campbell Bower, Laura Michelle Kelly, Edward Sanders
Screened at: AMC Lincoln Square, NYC, 12/4/07
Opens: December 21, 2007

For decades, pundits have said that movies would kill the stage, but Broadway, “Off-Broadway” and local theaters are alive and well, because nothing can replace the live performance, which is why “Cats,” and “The Phantom of the Opera” ran for over a decade and “The Fantasticks” had a continuous run for forty-two years. Hundred thousand dollar hi-fi equipment in movie theaters notwithstanding, nothing beats live music. Yet there’s much to be said for movie versions of stage musicals. Fred Zinnemann’s 1955 movie “Oklahoma” opened up the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical brilliantly, so when Gordan MacRae’s Curly McLain sang “Oh Want a Beautiful Morning,” you could see just how beautiful it was on the big screen as you could barely imagine on the stage of New York’s St. James in 1943 or London’s Theatre Royal in 1947.

“Sweeney Todd” is a different story. One can imagine Stephen Sondheim’s thrillingly dissonant music’s captivating an audience on the stage of London’s Theatre Royal in 1980 with Dennis Quilley in the role of the vindictive title figure or with Len Cariou as a larger-than-life barber at New York’s Uris in 1979 with Angela Lansbury as his protector and collaborator in murder. A live orchestra certainly did not hurt. But “Sweeney” is a claustrophobic play that does not translate as well to the big screen, try as photographer Dariusz Wolski may under the signature eerie direction of Tim Burton. The mood is there all right. The color is desaturated with the exception of Sweeney Todd’s happier days in London when in the throes of young love with his pretty wife and baby. Otherwise, Wolski’s lens sits principally inside the unprepossessing shop of Mrs. Nellie Lovett who by her own admission bakes the worst meat pies in London, and in the shop’s upstairs chambers in which resides a lone barber’s chair, uninhabited for a decade and one-half. Still, director Burton allows for subtle splashes of color within this desaturated framework: for the buckets of blood, of course, and for small items of costumes, a shock of blond hair on a young man, and the like.

The three-hour Broadway musical has been condensed to just under two, some songs abridged, with about seventy percent of the words sung; or to be more exact sung-spoken like the recitatives in an opera, allowing the well-cast Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, neither particular known for vocals, to engage the audience surprisingly well in the lyrics department. The story opens to Sondheim’s excessively loud music (bringing to mind an organ piece that prefaces the Broadway version of “Phantom of the Opera”) as we watch a beaten Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) return by ship from fifteen years of an unjustified sentence in an Australian prison, sent by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman—an exceedingly well-cast villain). Turpin, who soon thereafter rapes Todd’s wife (who allegedly kills herself) and locks up her baby, Johanna (played later as a teen by Jayne Wisner), is targeted by Todd for revenge as is the judge’s beadle (Timothy Spall). When young Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) falls instantly in love with 15-year-old Johanna upon gazing upon her in the window, he is determined to free her from the judge’s clutches, while for his part Sweeney, given protection by Mrs. Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), is set up in his old job on Fleet Street as a barber. Together they work out a macabre partnership. He slits throats. She makes delicious pies with the flesh of the victims.

“Sweeney Todd” is a slasher film on one level, one which could conceivably draw the “Hostel” audience; a stagy film that appeals to the intellect on another level, given its witty lyrics and thereby find kinship with the Chardonnay sippers on another. This is not the sort of musical that would find favor with those who grumble “I couldn’t find a single tune to hum on the way out of the theater,” because the songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Harry Warren and Joshua Logan are no longer in fashion. Forget about “Younger than Springtime,” “Stranger in Paradise,” and “I’ll Know.” You won’t get a diabetic rush from most of Sondheim’s dissonant lyrics—not from “There’s No Place Like London” (not likely to be adopted by the British Tourist Commission) or “The Worst Pies in London” (nor by the UK Restaurant Board).

While Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Adolfo Pirelli, a snake-oil salesman who works the crowd with a young man, Toby (Edward Sanders) he picked up at a workhouse, is wasted in a bland role, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are made for each other, a perfect match of Victorian villainy--lumpen proles battling the effete establishment. If “Sweeney Todd” is a disappointment, a “B” instead of a straight “A,” it’s only because I, a maven of musical mayhem, went in with expectations too high.

Rated R. 117 minutes. © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online