Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen

Written by: John Logan, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim

Directed by: Tim Burton

Distributor: Dreamworks SKG

Rated: R

Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter cook up something special in Sweeney Todd

I’ve never seen Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 stage musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but with its giddy bloodlust and morbid beauty, I would imagine Tim Burton’s adaptation approximates the original’s grandiosity. I was hardly surprised to learn that, according to Broadway lore, half of the opening night audience walked out of Sondheim’s musical, unsure how to process its perverse blend of eruptive violence and the sentimental conventions firmly couched in the Broadway musical genre. In Burton’s film, this conflation is epitomized by the musical number in which Johnny Depp as the titular killer belts out an ode to his silver straight razors, the blades’ glimmer providing a hint of light in Burton’s predictably dreary mise en scène, the madness and the humanity in Sweeney’s eyes impossible to separate.

Returning from 15 years of wrongful imprisonment, Sweeney Todd’s singular passion is to enact revenge on the judge who sent him away, raped his wife, and now stands guardian over his daughter — a revenge to be carried out via “the closest shave you’ll ever know.” Conveniently, as Sweeney disposes of his Fleet Street clientele (in a half-hilarious, half-unsettling musical number drenched in spewing blood), the victims resuscitate Mrs. Lovett’s floundering meat pie restaurant by supplying her with plenty of flesh.

Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (as Mrs. Lovett) play their roles as if they were still stagebound, emoting to the rafters, often in meticulously framed close-up — and of course, a story as operatic as this can only be told with such furious abandon. It’s almost ludicrously tragic, and while the film relishes this zeal, it’s also totally sincere — which makes its brutality (and its hints of compassion) ultimately affecting. The film ends on a note of bloodstained tragedy; while an act of hope and love almost certainly follows, the audience is not offered this scene as reassurance, left only to wallow in Sweeney Todd’s disastrous vengeance.

The Fleet Street setting is immersive, as Burton’s fantastic environments usually are. Aided by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and production designer Dante Ferretti, he presents to us a gray-clouded, eternally dank vision of hell on earth. Yet images of a brighter past and of a once-happy family ripped apart by the corruption of humanity suggest a fairy-tale world that is created by the horrors of reality; in this way Sweeney Todd shares something in common with Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, in which real-world wickedness and fantastical evil are inseparable — one bleeds into and creates the other.

Its attempts at moral inquisitiveness are probably less important than its bleak sense of humor and its perfect visual evocation of a smoke- and blood-drenched cesspool, but all of this vileness leads to an exceptionally empathetic view of its characters. Indeed, and shockingly, Sweeney Todd is probably the filmmaker’s most sensitive film (except for Big Fish, which also happens to be one of his worst), never mind the fact that it has the most gruesomely gorgeous geysers of blood since Suspiria. VS