Bringing such material to the screen is certainly a tricky endeavor, and plopping it down right in the middle of the Christmas season is such a delightfully morbid maneuver for a major studio that it’s hard to resist celebrating the film simply for its release date. In this regard, it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker besides Tim Burton tackling such an adaptation; with his affinity for outsiders, dark visual sensibilities, and previous success with wedding his nightmarish outré visions with mainstream appeal, he was perhaps the only real choice. While Burton has never directed a live-action musical before, this inexperience is actually a plus because making Sweeney Todd work onscreen is more about mood and visuals than it is about choreography and precision of singing. Burton took the risk of casting primarily for actors, not singers, and it paid off because the characters pop off the screen as more than cartoonish ghouls with glorious voices. There is real anguish and pathos and melodrama, and if the voices aren’t always at the level one might expect, their very roughness reflects the violence and torment of the material much better than perfectly sustained notes would.

As Sweeney Todd, Johnny Depp once again disappears into his character, but this time he brings with him a burning intensity that is unmatched by any of his performances. When we first meet Sweeney, he is sailing back to London after 15 years in the Australian penal colonies, and his eyes (both the dark circles underneath them and the angry glint within them) tell us that he has already been consumed by his personal tragedy. He is hellbent on revenge, and he immediately returns to the house where he once lived happily with his beautiful wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and infant daughter. In brightly saturated flashbacks (virtually the only time in the film when we have genuine color outside of grays and red), we discover that Sweeney’s life was stolen away from him by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who coveted his wife and had him sent away under false charges. Sweeney discovers that his wife has since poisoned herself, and with the help of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the disheveled proprietor of a bakeshop downstairs that produces “the worst pies in London,” he sets about enacting his revenge by re-establishing his barber shop and waiting for Judge Turpin to sit in his chair so he can slit his throat.

Working from a screenplay by John Logan (The Aviator), Burton spends the first half of the film focused on the emotional core of the material--the seething bitterness of Sweeney’s loss and his hyper-focused vengeance. There are a few hiccups along the way, particularly in the form of a competitive Italian barber named Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), who threatens to unveil Sweeney’s true identity. Once Sweeney gets Judge Turpin in his chair and then misses the opportunity to do him in, the story takes an immediate nose dive into much darker territory, with Sweeney losing his mind and turning his razor’s edge against virtually anyone who makes the mistake of darkening his doorstep. His focused vengeance turns into a mad killing spree, with Mrs. Lovett aiding in the disposal of the bodies by hacking them up and baking them into her suddenly popular meat pies. The grotesque irony of London’s population unknowingly embracing the taste of human flesh is just one of Sweeney Todd’s nastier delights, and Burton unleashes the film’s full Grand Guignol debauchery in its second half, drawing on musty memories of old Hammer horror films to escalate the story of revenge into full-on horrorshow tragedy. Burton doesn’t hold back on the spurting arteries, allowing all those slit throats to spray forth with melted Crayola gore as if they were visualizations of Sweeney Todd’s personal demons breaking free. It may be too much for some, but for those who can appreciate the tastefully tasteless, it’s a feverish jolt to the senses to see such beautiful music and pathos paired with such horrid images.

And that’s precisely where Sweeney Todd’s unlikely success feels so bold. The film could have easily been a one-dimensional dime-story horror cartoon, but Burton never dismisses the emotional resonance of the material, and the actors plays their roles with the kind of heady abandon that draws you into their dilemmas. Ridiculous as it sounds, you understand why Sweeney is slicing all those throats, and Depp’s growly pop vocals are the stuff of true torment. As Mrs. Lovett, Helena Bonham Carter brings a richly pathetic vibe to the twisted character, and while her voice is certainly the thinnest, it never detracts from the intensity. A subplot involving a young man named Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) wooing Sweeney’s now-teenage daughter Joanna (Jayne Wisener), who has become the ward of Judge Turpin, never quite catches fire, but even that isn’t enough to diminish Sweeney Todd’s goosebump-inducing mixture of horror and high tragedy.

Copyright © 2008 James Kendrick

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