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‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’

Johnny Depp is no Broadway belter, but that’s no mark against him in another great performance.

By Bob Brown
   Well, happy bloody holidays! This is the oddest season to debut Sweeney Todd for the movies. Not much holiday cheer in this production, but it is a film spectacle in its own right. Director Tim Burton is not one to shy away from the macabre and Halloween is 10 months away, so why can’t this be a Christmas movie? This might be expected from the guy who came up with The Nightmare Before Christmas.
   The center of attraction is, of course, the sublime music, with score and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Never mind that the stars weren’t chosen for their singing abilities. Movie crowds just want to see big names in the major roles. The joy is in watching Johnny Depp inhabit the title role of Benjamin Barker, refashioned as Sweeney Todd. Having lost his wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly) and baby Johanna to the evil machinations of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), Barker returns to London from 15 years of false imprisonment and sets up shop on Fleet Street. There he plots his revenge.
   His instant cohort is a pie baker, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), purveyor of the worst meat pies in Victorian London. When Todd dispatches his first victim, the rival barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), Mrs. Lovett’s horror turns to understanding. Pirelli couldn’t be allowed to live, because he knew Todd’s secret identity. But how to dispose of the body? Meat is scarce; bodies are meat; ergo, a new and profitable source for better pies. With the proper teamwork, Todd and Lovett build a lucrative business, while he awaits the most opportune moment for Judge Turpin to grace his shabby tonsorial parlor.
   Meanwhile, a young sailor, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who had befriended Todd on the voyage home from Australia, coincidentally spies the very beautiful Johanna (Jayne Wisener), now a teenager. She is seen in the second-story window of Judge Turpin’s London dwelling, where she is his virtual prisoner. Vowing to win her, Anthony seeks Todd’s help in spiriting her away, not knowing that Johanna is Todd’s long-lost daughter.
   Sondheim based his musical on Christopher Bond’s play of 1973, which drew on various versions of early Victorian fictions. Mixed in are urban legends about murder victims baked into savory meat pies. And urban legends circulate like viruses simply because they have a tenacious grip on the imagination, more so than mere fact. Though London had its share of legendary serial murderers, Sweeney Todd was not one of them, but representative of a class of malcontents driven to desperation by the conditions that the class system perpetuated — much as in Dickens’ novels.
   The squalor is palpable in the set design by Oscar-winner Dante Ferretti, who had similar success at making decay elegant in Gangs of New York and Black Dahlia. As photographed by Dariusz Wolski, the exteriors (mostly on a London soundstage) are as gloomy as the interiors. Even a spring day in the country is lit by an anemic sun, and a truncated palette. Everything is in a narrow range of blues, blacks and slate grays, with only the scarlet of gushing blood to break the monotony. And gush it does. Todd is surely the closest shave in the city. The first cut is the unkindest. Customers spout profusely before being tipped backward down a chute to the cellar, where the baker awaits. After the shock of the first murder, the shaves lose some of their edge, but the power to sicken is cumulative. The indiscriminate slashing will catch up with the barber in a most ironic way.
   The only relief to Burton’s dark tone of dread and gloom, which pervades the movie, is a brief comic sequence in which Mrs. Lovett imagines what life will be like after Todd has completed his main mission. They’ll live happily by the seashore in bright candy colors under azure skies.
   Depp’s Todd hardly breaks his scowl the whole time, driven by his obsession and his certainty that all humanity is not worth dung. That he can’t do a tune like a Broadway belter is no mark against him. It’s another of his signal great character performances. He’s up for a Golden Globe, as are Burton and Carter, who actually does better by the lyrics. A fine and funny cameo by Cohen is reminiscent of his Borat performance. Bower and Wisener are fresh and winning (though also tune-challenged), making their feature-length debuts in this movie. And Timothy Spall is terrific as the foppish, fawning Beadle Bamford. Ed Sanders plays Lovett’s boy assistant, Toby, in a self-conscious, child-actorly way. That’s too bad, since he’s so crucial to the plot.
   In the end, it comes back to the music and the lyrics. These are strong enough to have supported opera-company productions of the work, as well as symphonic orchestra presentations, and there have been several major revivals. The orchestra on the soundtrack is nowhere credited, so one assumes it was a studio contract group. It’s a lush, exciting score. But don’t bring the kids to this film. Its gore is worthy of a slasher movie which, in effect, it is.
Rated R for graphic bloody violence.