Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd!

I saw Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at a word-of-mouth screening packed with people who I got the feeling were unfamiliar with the Stephen Sondheim musical it’s adapted from. I base my suspicions on the gasps of shocked laughter that greeted the many murders Johnny Depp commits over the course of the film. The shock, I think, arose from how unexpectedly grisly those murders were, with thick geysers of Bava-red blood gushing from the throat of one hapless Londoner after another. Was this grim, blood-drenched revenge saga really the kind of movie they wanted to see less than a week before Christmas? And the laughter, I think, came from them realizing that yes! Yes! This was exactly the kind of movie they were in the mood for: big, bloody, deliciously cynical, with a plot whose machinery grinds away with the frightening inevitability of one of those dark Victorian workhouses Sweeney Todd can glimpse from the window of his barbershop.

That’s where he’s plotting his revenge against Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who 15 years earlier falsely sentenced him to life and transported him to Australia. Now Todd’s wife is dead and his beautiful daughter Johanna lives as a virtual prisoner and prospective bride in Turpin’s home. But until Todd can figure out a way to lure Turpin to his place of business, he slakes his bloodlust by killing random customers—he strikes a bargain with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), his downstairs neighbour, who uses the corpses as a cheap but delicious ingredient in the meat pies she sells.

The plot teeters on the edge of camp, and the original Broadway production (or at least the version filmed for PBS and currently available on DVD) made a point of playing up the comic elements—Angela Lansbury’s performance as Mrs. Lovett especially indulged in a lot of mugging to the audience.

By contrast, director Tim Burton makes the surprising decision to play the story mostly straight: it took me a little while to warm up to Carter’s underplaying, but I grew to admire her take on Mrs. Lovett not as a comic gargoyle but as a grim, practical-minded, quietly cunning businesswoman. The dazzlingly clever cannibalism puns in “A Little Priest” are still here, but in a shortened, much drier form. Indeed, the biggest comic setpiece is now “By the Sea,” a bit of a throwaway number in the original which here becomes a blackly funny ditty in which Burton visualizes Mrs. Lovett’s lovesick fantasy of running a seaside hotel with Sweeney—whose gloomy, scowling presence spoils each tableau, like a cockroach stuck in the icing of a birthday cake.

That sequence aside, Depp is the film’s biggest shortcoming. Sweeney is a very vocally demanding role, and there’s just no disguising the fact that Depp’s voice (and his phony British accent) aren’t up to the challenge of some of the show’s most powerful songs—he talk-sings his way through “Epiphany” when he should be careening wildly from one emotional extreme to another. In many of the musical numbers, you can feel Burton covering for and cutting around Depp’s vocal weaknesses (and, to a lesser extent, Carter’s), and a Sweeney who can’t thrill you musically is almost a contradiction in terms.

And yet, I can’t imagine any fan of the show not being thrilled with this version of it. Screenwriter John Logan makes several cuts and alterations to the songs and story, but they are all unfailingly intelligent, tightening up the suspense, speeding up the plot, and emphasizing the cruelty and cheapness of life in the Victorian age in ways much more subtly effective than the intrusive Brechtian staging Harold Prince created for the original. Plus, the arrangements are good and loud, just the way I like ’em.

Burton has been trying to get this project off the ground for two decades, but unlike so many Hollywood directors’ pet projects, this one doesn’t feel locked up in its creator’s head. It’s got a mad, slashing excitement that hopefully will get people past their squeamishness at the sight of blood. As Sweeney himself cries out, “I’m alive at last, and I’m full of joy!”