I have to admit to only being a part-time fan of director Tim Burton's work. Between the magnificence of Beetle Juice and Ed Wood, to the mind-boggling lowpoint of Planet of the Apes, I've found his storytelling track record to be spotty at best. At times, I've felt that his ideas can be so esoteric, that surely the man must truly be from another planet, if not another dimensional reality altogether(and trust me, I like myself some weird stuff from time to time).
That said, the director's cinematic adaptation of the broad-way play Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street finds him once more on solid footing, telling a tale to which we mere mortals on planet Earth can relate.
Like the play of the same name, the film tells the story of one Benjamin Barker(Johnny Depp), a young barber by trade, who is married to a heavenly beauty named Lucy(Laura Michelle Kelly). Living in 19th Century London, the couple have an infant daugh-ter named Johanna, and all is well in their world. That is, until the day a lust-filled judge named Turpin(superbly played by Alan Rickman) catches sight of Lucy, and is determined to take her as his own, no matter the cost. To this end, Turpin frames Bark-er for an unspecified crime and has him shipped to an Australian prison for a stretch of fifteen years. In the interim, Turpin lures Lucy to his house under false pretenses and rapes her in full view of uncaring guests at a party hosted by the judge. This helps to drive her over the edge, and Lucy takes poison to end the pain, unwittingly leaving her daughter in the judge's clutches, where she grows into Turpin's lovely teen ward(at this point now played by newcomer Jayne Wisener).
At the end of his prison term, Barker returns to London, accompanied by a young sailer named Anthony Hope(Jamie Campbell Bower), whom he's met on the journey. Bidding adieu at the docks, and knowing Turpin has forgotten all about him, Barker adopts the identity of Sweeney Todd in order to plan his revenge. Finding a similarly dark-minded ally in the person of failing restauranteur Mrs. Lovett(played by director Burton's girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter) Todd takes up residence in the loft upstairs from Lovett's meat pie hovel. Along the course of his plotting, Todd learns from young Hope that his daughter Johanna is alive and in Turpin's clutches. The two men hatch a plan to free Todd's daughter, although Hope is oblivious both to the fact she is Todd's child, and that Todd has a devious end in store for the judge.
Closely following the blueprint lain out in the Stephen Sondheim original, Tim Burton crafts a masterful tale told as a musical. The characters sing their plans, whistle vengefully, and emote operatically on their intentions. While Depp isn't a fully classically trained singer, he manages to hold his own among a group of able musical performers. The greatest of these is teen-ager Ed Sanders, making his acting debut in this piece, and whose vocals are nothing short of amazing! His range and emotional intensity as Toby, a young boy pulled from the over-bearing providence of narcissistic barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli(Sacha Baron Cohen) and likewise saved from the workhouse by Sweeney and Lovett's murder and cooking of the rival hairsnipp-er(Lovett concocts a plan to make Todd's victims into meat pies, in a bid to aid him and save her shop).
Although early on, Burton does use his typical zooming pans to rapidly close in on specific points of interest, he thankfully reins in this tired technique. His London does show influences which are definitely part of the standard Burton design: odd perspectives and building designs which both put his signature on the creation, as well as making this universe a place which is just one step away from the reality we know. However, he shows considerable restraint in his production design which wasn't always present in earlier films; this London is a filthy place of squalor and bleakness. It's represented in black and white, which is a type of symbolism for how Todd and Mrs. Lovett view their own world. He sees it as a horrid place, where folks are better off dead than alive. She sees pretty much nothing but him, and has an amusing and humorous fantasy of the two of them settling down along a beach somewhere...and even in her own mind, he only half-heartedly obliges her. Flashbacks to the life Barker once had are shown in color, representing the joy which was once in his life. The rest of the world in present time contains the occasional splotch of color here and there, but for the most part it's a sorrowful place, even though the themes of love, revenge and redemption--all powerful emotions generally represented as bright red on most painters' palettes--are constants.
In fact, the only time we get to see red in all its glory is when Todd slits the throats of his clientele...of which there are plenty of closeups. There have been numerous complaints from other critics about these sequences, and I find such to be utterly ridic-ulous. The movie is rated R, the subtitle is The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, folks are aware of what the movie is about...what in the world are people whining for? If you don't want to see so much blood(and there's more on display here than in the curr-ently running Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), keep your money in your pocket and just don't go...but for God's sake, stop crying like a four year-old whose ice cream just hit the floor!
For the rest of us in the mature section of the theater, there's a movie out that will elate the senses and deliver solid perform-ances from a multi-talented cast. Burton knows the potential and limits of his crew, and gives no one actor more musical challenge than their range can successfully uphold. And it seems that like his cast, the director has finally learned the boundaries of his own range, even while ambitiously expanding the limits of what true cinema can deliver.
And in that process, he has managed to deliver the last great movie of this year.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
Bloody Rapture
Sweeney Todd arrives from stage to screen, its gory glory intact.
A trip to the barber heralds Tim Burton's return to glory.
The barber formerly known as Barker(Depp) seeks revenge with the aid of failing shopkeep Lovett(Carter).
The diabolical Judge Turpin(Rickman) sets his lustful sights on Barker's daughter Johanna(Wisener, right).
Flashbacks tell the tale of how the loss of Barker's wife Lucy (Kelly, center) ultimately destroyed him.
Todd sets up Judge Turpin for the final act.
