Sunday night I finally made it to the theatre to see the film version of my favorite musical of all time, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I have been looking forward to this moment since I first heard that they were doing it. I thought that if anyone could do it justice Tim Burton could. Johnny Depp as Sweeney I wasn’t sure about, but I love Johnny so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Once back in London Todd goes looking for his wife and child and instead finds an abandoned apartment and his old neighbor Mrs. Lovett that runs the pie shop downstairs. She recognizes him and fills him in on what happened to his wife and baby. Lucy went crazy and drank poison after being lured to a party at which she was raped by the Judge and his friends. Johanna became a ward of the state and the Judge adopted her.
Todd and Lovett form a plan to exact his revenge on the Beadle and the Judge. They set his barber shop back up and he starts taking customers. He goes out and challenges the “Barber of Kings” to a duel and promptly defeats him, gaining the favor of the Beadle. Pirelli, the “barber of kings” also recognizes Todd and tries to blackmail him. This is the beginning of the bloodshed. Todd swiftly slits his throat, and Mrs. Lovett suggests using the body to make meat pies. From here you can only guess where the story leads. Lots of blood gets spilled, they become the most famous pie shop in London and he gets his vengeance.
The opening credits are where I started to grow concerned. It was badly digitized cartoon blood running through practically every set piece of the movie, and it lasted way too long. I consider myself easily amused and admittedly biased about this movie because of my love of the show. From there the casting decisions and the directing became the most obvious shortfalls of the movie.
The casting was all off with four exceptions: Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli was brilliant. He was the only character that wasn’t steeped in goth and depression. He was flamboyant and funny, and I was even impressed with his singing. Alan Rickman as the evil Judge Turpin was a sight… We all knew he was a great actor, and we all knew he could play a bad guy, but the emotions that he shows in this movie, just on his face, are more than the rest of the cast combined! Timothy Spall as Beadle was creepy and effective as always and Ed Sanders who played the boy Toby was… uh… does it sound bad if I say he was adequate?
Anthony in the movie played by a barely pubescent boy.
Johnny Depp, while he did a satisfactory job, was grossly unsuited to play this role. Sweeney is a substantial man that has spent a good fifteen years in a hard labor prison, and is filled with only hope for his family and hate for his enemies. Johnny Depp is a small waifish boy of a man that is more petulant child than vengeful devil. And if you tell me that the character he portrays has seen one hard day in his life you would get laughed out of the theater. Helena Bonham Carter was equally disappointing as Mrs. Lovett, but at least she made me laugh once or twice, when I could understand what she was saying. Let me put it this way, have you ever seen the local High School put on a show that you saw done up properly on Broadway? That is what seeing this movie is like.
Anthony as he is written, a sailor in his twenties
The main issues I have with this movie are the decisions that Tim Burton made in the directing. First, I don’t know why he is so obsessed with it, but for the love of all that is holy, please, dear god please… come out of the dark Tim, and take those stupid goth clothes off and start making some decent movies again. I would like to know exactly what the decision making process looked like when he decided to remove all color (with the exception of the brilliant Cohen) from the film. You think I’m kidding or overreacting? Than please explain to me why the actors faces were painted black and white, and why the sets were all (and I mean even the outdoors shots) in shades of grey, matte brown, black and white. None of these photo's have been altered. This really is how much color there is in the film.The only real color in the movie was Cohen, the overly ridiculous animated blood and that painfully unnecessary dream sequence. It felt like in the editing room Burton started to realize there was no color and told his crew to just throw together a scene to make up for it.
Burton has always been a bit on the dark side, but in his heyday of Edward Sissorhands and the first two Batman movies, at least he balanced out the darkness with the light. Here it is just all so saturated in goth that it just makes me want to die, die, die my hair black. The people move like zombies, the leads sound whiny and pathetic, and the only time I got lit up at all was when Cohen and Rickman were chewing up the set, which only proves that some actors are great no matter how bad the director.
The biggest slap in the face however, was the slow painful mutilation exacted on the score. If you are going to have all the extras in the background of the movie anyway, why would you cut out nearly every single song the chorus sings? Burton decided to make a musical with actors that don’t really sing, while simultaneously cutting out the entire chorus. In the stage version it is the chorus that tells the story, with screeching whistles and sopranos howling at the very top of their range while the basses are booming away at the bottom of theirs. The score is truly a magnificent piece of work that has been winning awards since the day it was written and has been preformed by professional theatres for 29 years across the globe. And yet, Burton decided to butcher the score and put out a musical with a bunch of unmemorable half-sung parts of songs, leaving the most amazing pieces of composition on the cutting room floor. Gone is the wallop of a punch the final two songs of the stage version pack. I remember the first time I walked out of that musical, I was looking around me for crazy people thinking that any moment Todd might show up to slit my throat. Walking out of the movie all I could feel was relief that it was finally over.
I know this review sounds a bit scathing, and I am sorry about that. But I did warn you that this was my favorite musical of all time. And therefore I was not going to be able to give an unbiased review. So, if you are looking for an unbiased review here it is: If you have never seen or know nothing about the superior stage version, than you will be moderately entertained by this movie. However, if you ever have any intention of seeing this musical done up right, save the $19.99 that you would pay for the DVD and just buy a ticket the next time the show comes to town.
