Director Tim Burton delivers a visionary new nightmare before Christmas with his macabre adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical Sweeney Todd. As the haunted pipe organ and bloody opening credits make abundantly clear, this gory film, laced with coal-black humor, is not your average musical.
A sickly wraith with sunken eyes, Sweeney Todd (played with pained ferocity by Johnny Depp) is haunted by memory. He was once a naïve, young barber with a beautiful wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and a darling baby girl, until the corrupt, lascivious Judge Turpin (the reliably brilliant Alan Rickman), determined to have Barker’s bride for his own, arrests Barker on a fallacious charge and has him shipped him off to the hellish Australian penal colony of Botany Bay.
Rescued after fifteen years, Barker—who rechristens himself Sweeney Todd—returns to his old barber shop on London’s grimy Fleet Street. He learns from the current tenant, the widowed Mrs. Lovett (a witchily irreverent Helena Bonham Carter) that his despairing wife poisoned herself, and, worse still, his daughter Johanna was adopted by the vile Turpin—who now intends to take the young woman (played with china girl fragility by Jayne Wisener) as his bride. In a fit of mad rage, Todd takes up one of his old razors and unsheathes the blade. “At last my arm is complete!” he howls, ready for vengeance.
In bringing the play to the screen, Burton chose wisely to cast actors who could sing Sondheim’s peerless lyrics and melodies, rather than singing actors. Depp, who fronted a band in his younger days, may not have the bombastic range of veterans like Len Cariou (who played Todd in the original stage production), but in his subtle phrasing and nuanced delivery does a remarkable job communicating the mixture of rage and pain that drives Todd to murder. Helena Bonham Carter is top notch as Mrs. Loveyy; two of her songs, “A Little Priest” and “By The Sea,” are particularly superb as giddy tidbits of gothic rhyme. Sacha Baron Cohen, making a hilarious turn as Adolfo Pirelli—Todd’s competitor and would-be blackmailer—proves himself an adept singer and cultural mimic before being bloodily dispatched by Todd.
As expected in a play where about a razor-wielding madman, there is violence aplenty. Fountains of tomato-red gore flood the screen and Todd’s unfortunate victims are even baked into meat pies. Yet to Burton’s credit, the murder and mayhem comes off more as absurd than anything else. For a director who only once before tackled the musical genre (in his cult classic The Nightmare Before Christmas), Burton does a remarkable job marshalling all of Sondheim’s manic elements into one of his best efforts since 1994’s Ed Wood. Though the source material is the titular 1979 play, Sweeney Todd is every bit a Burton vehicle—complete with the German expressionist sets, crisp pacing and cross-cutting, outlandish costuming (by Burton regular and two-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood) and the same tragic pathos that underpinned the other great Burton/Depp production, Edward Scissorhands.
The missteps are few: Jamie Campbell Bower, who looks disturbingly like Angelina Jolie in male form, seems horribly miscast as Johanna’s rescuer and love interest, Anthony Hope. Though we hear the strains of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” in the opening scene of the film, one wishes the song was included in its cautionary entirety. And for sheer kitsch value it would have been a delight to see Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) revisit his role as Mrs. Lovett’s young protégé Tobias Ragg. But these quibbles are few. Burton and Depp have delivered a deliriously well-crafted Sweeney Todd that’s sure to please.
