Sweeney Todd
Directed by Tim Burton
The only hope for Sweeney Todd was if Tim Burton corrected its Broadway pomposity and made it a goofy Halloween blow-out: One with better music than that irritating Nightmare Before Christmas score and dumping the been-there, don’t-wanna-see-that-again Corpse Bride puppetry. Burton is at his best using flesh-and-blood figures for his comic-macabre visions (Mars Attacks, Sleepy Hollow) and his eccentric empathy for outsiders might have redeemed composer Stephen Sondheim’s ghoulishly unfunny theatrical conceit about “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” Instead, this well-sung and perfectly acted adaptation falls way short of a triumph because Burton misplaces his sense of humor. He only almost makes Sweeney Todd his own.
Although the original score has been truncated, this Sweeney Todd—even with sumptuous orchestrations by Paul Geminiani—remains an artifact of Broadway decadence. Sondheim adapted a stage play based on urban legend about a serial killer in 19th century London—a barber who slit the throats of his customers and his accomplice, a baker who used their flesh to make meat pies. This homicide-and-cannibalism concept never worked as social satire. Rather, Sondheim used the tale to imitate Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Because Sweeney Todd followed Sondheim’s tuneful 1970s masterpieces Company and Follies, critics ignored the fact that it replaced social critique with a lurid celebration of crazed ambition.
Now we’re once again forced to confront the tawdry perspectives of the last reigning purveyors of the Broadway musical.
Bob Fosse’s Chicago similarly twisted cynicism into showbiz routines. So Sondheim topped Fosse’s perversity with a more bloodthirsty, freakish ode to nihilism, writing Sweeney Todd with operatic extravagance. But Tim Burton mistakes Sondheim’s degradation of Grand Guignol for his own pop mischief. Casting Johnny Depp as the demon barber and Helena Bonham Carter as the mad-baker Mrs. Lovett, Burton lends his sensibility to an enterprise that in no way complements his delightful sense of the outré.
Beneath the lovely blue-period hues of Burton’s spooky merriment, Sweeney Todd’s narrative is a bad fit for Burton. Todd’s madness doesn’t grow in depth like Burton’s usual misunderstood protagonists; it just gets louder and more grandiose. Without a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari angle, Burton succumbs to period-picture self-importance. No wonder Johnny Depp’s Todd wears an angry Susan Sontag white patch in his hair.
Todd’s energetic first aria is a montage of sarcastic confrontations with the denizens of grimy London, but the sappy intrusion of young sailor Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) falling in love with Johanna (Jayne Wisener), ward of the cruel Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his nefarious Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall), offers no satirical counterpoint.
Sondheim’s melodies sanction Todd’s curse on Turpin who wronged and imprisoned him many years ago, and on the world that looked askance. This isn’t Jacobean tragedy, it’s cliché; and Sweeney Todd’s Dickensian allusions are fallacious.
When Todd sings: “It’s man devouring man, my dear/Who are we to deny it in here?” it compares poorly to the authentic moral/social rigor plentifully expressed at the time of the show’s 1980 debut in British punk rock. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces made Sweeney Todd seem paltry and Sondheim’s “The world is a big black pit/And the people of the world inhabit it” was crap next to X-Ray Spex’s “I Live Off You” that included the lines: “The cat eats the rat/The pimp beats the whore/ And she just screams out for more and more/ See we gotta be exploited/ See we gotta be exploited/ By somebody/By somebody/By somebody.” Singer-songwriter Poly Styrene wasn’t cloning Brecht, but singing openly, passionately, humorously about Western civilization.
Burton seems ignorant of punk rock’s glorious moment when youthful spleen was politically driven to musical genius. Stuck in creature-feature geekdom, Burton swallows Sondheim’s exploitation of Broadway cynicism and sentimentalizes Todd’s deranged reprisals. Only one scene, when Anthony rescues Johanna from prison and tells the warden, “I leave you to the mercy of your children!” shows Burton’s wit—a riot of displaced adolescent hormones. Overall, Burton’s made an overscaled tale of an emotional cripple just like Edward Scissorhands—whimsical, impassioned and ultimately repugnant.
Don’t think Burton has stepped up in class by stepping into Sondheim’s jackboots. Sweeney Todd lowers Burton’s own comic-book vivacity. The empathy Burton usually provides for freakish outsiders like Depp’s memorable Ed Wood and Willy Wonka gets debased. Perhaps only David Fincher could have appropriately conveyed Sondheim’s depravity. Imagine Zodiac with a score by Philip Glass. (Oops, that’s Woody Allen’s upcoming Cassandra’s Dream.) Reveling in bloodlust is too much like torture-porn, too analogous to Abu Ghraib. This movie should have offered the giddy sanity of De Palma’s Grand Guignol musical, Phantom of the Paradise, not pseudo-operatic gravitas. Burton turns Todd’s bloodletting into a cascade of crimson tears; his final tableau stretches outrage into mawkishness. When Burton goes wrong, he morphs into David Cronenberg.
Directed by Tim Burton
The only hope for Sweeney Todd was if Tim Burton corrected its Broadway pomposity and made it a goofy Halloween blow-out: One with better music than that irritating Nightmare Before Christmas score and dumping the been-there, don’t-wanna-see-that-again Corpse Bride puppetry. Burton is at his best using flesh-and-blood figures for his comic-macabre visions (Mars Attacks, Sleepy Hollow) and his eccentric empathy for outsiders might have redeemed composer Stephen Sondheim’s ghoulishly unfunny theatrical conceit about “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” Instead, this well-sung and perfectly acted adaptation falls way short of a triumph because Burton misplaces his sense of humor. He only almost makes Sweeney Todd his own.
Although the original score has been truncated, this Sweeney Todd—even with sumptuous orchestrations by Paul Geminiani—remains an artifact of Broadway decadence. Sondheim adapted a stage play based on urban legend about a serial killer in 19th century London—a barber who slit the throats of his customers and his accomplice, a baker who used their flesh to make meat pies. This homicide-and-cannibalism concept never worked as social satire. Rather, Sondheim used the tale to imitate Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Because Sweeney Todd followed Sondheim’s tuneful 1970s masterpieces Company and Follies, critics ignored the fact that it replaced social critique with a lurid celebration of crazed ambition.
Now we’re once again forced to confront the tawdry perspectives of the last reigning purveyors of the Broadway musical.
Bob Fosse’s Chicago similarly twisted cynicism into showbiz routines. So Sondheim topped Fosse’s perversity with a more bloodthirsty, freakish ode to nihilism, writing Sweeney Todd with operatic extravagance. But Tim Burton mistakes Sondheim’s degradation of Grand Guignol for his own pop mischief. Casting Johnny Depp as the demon barber and Helena Bonham Carter as the mad-baker Mrs. Lovett, Burton lends his sensibility to an enterprise that in no way complements his delightful sense of the outré.
Beneath the lovely blue-period hues of Burton’s spooky merriment, Sweeney Todd’s narrative is a bad fit for Burton. Todd’s madness doesn’t grow in depth like Burton’s usual misunderstood protagonists; it just gets louder and more grandiose. Without a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari angle, Burton succumbs to period-picture self-importance. No wonder Johnny Depp’s Todd wears an angry Susan Sontag white patch in his hair.
Todd’s energetic first aria is a montage of sarcastic confrontations with the denizens of grimy London, but the sappy intrusion of young sailor Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) falling in love with Johanna (Jayne Wisener), ward of the cruel Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his nefarious Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall), offers no satirical counterpoint.
Sondheim’s melodies sanction Todd’s curse on Turpin who wronged and imprisoned him many years ago, and on the world that looked askance. This isn’t Jacobean tragedy, it’s cliché; and Sweeney Todd’s Dickensian allusions are fallacious.
When Todd sings: “It’s man devouring man, my dear/Who are we to deny it in here?” it compares poorly to the authentic moral/social rigor plentifully expressed at the time of the show’s 1980 debut in British punk rock. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces made Sweeney Todd seem paltry and Sondheim’s “The world is a big black pit/And the people of the world inhabit it” was crap next to X-Ray Spex’s “I Live Off You” that included the lines: “The cat eats the rat/The pimp beats the whore/ And she just screams out for more and more/ See we gotta be exploited/ See we gotta be exploited/ By somebody/By somebody/By somebody.” Singer-songwriter Poly Styrene wasn’t cloning Brecht, but singing openly, passionately, humorously about Western civilization.
Burton seems ignorant of punk rock’s glorious moment when youthful spleen was politically driven to musical genius. Stuck in creature-feature geekdom, Burton swallows Sondheim’s exploitation of Broadway cynicism and sentimentalizes Todd’s deranged reprisals. Only one scene, when Anthony rescues Johanna from prison and tells the warden, “I leave you to the mercy of your children!” shows Burton’s wit—a riot of displaced adolescent hormones. Overall, Burton’s made an overscaled tale of an emotional cripple just like Edward Scissorhands—whimsical, impassioned and ultimately repugnant.
Don’t think Burton has stepped up in class by stepping into Sondheim’s jackboots. Sweeney Todd lowers Burton’s own comic-book vivacity. The empathy Burton usually provides for freakish outsiders like Depp’s memorable Ed Wood and Willy Wonka gets debased. Perhaps only David Fincher could have appropriately conveyed Sondheim’s depravity. Imagine Zodiac with a score by Philip Glass. (Oops, that’s Woody Allen’s upcoming Cassandra’s Dream.) Reveling in bloodlust is too much like torture-porn, too analogous to Abu Ghraib. This movie should have offered the giddy sanity of De Palma’s Grand Guignol musical, Phantom of the Paradise, not pseudo-operatic gravitas. Burton turns Todd’s bloodletting into a cascade of crimson tears; his final tableau stretches outrage into mawkishness. When Burton goes wrong, he morphs into David Cronenberg.
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