Review: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

* *

Johnny Depp, Helena-Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener. Directed by Tim Burton. Screenplay by John Logan from the musical by Stephen Sondheim. Rated R. 118 minutes. Warner Brothers.

Before discussing Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tim Burton’s macabre new film version of the celebrated Stephen Sondheim musical starring Johnny Depp as a throat-slashing barber seeking revenge on the man—and world—that wronged him, I’ll pause for a bit of perspective. Mine.

Risking the wrath of the Sondheim, Burton and Depp legions, I found this movie to be a tedious slog of dingy cinematography, monotonous songs, hollow performances and a leaden pace. Yet oddly, I’m a big fan of musicals onscreen (and stage). I had a blast with Hairspray. Once was sublime. Rent worked just fine. My iPOD contains everything from Cabaret to Hedwig to Across the Universe. But this new screen interpretation of Sweeney Todd, praised in many quarters as a Grand Guignol good time and inspired mounting of a Broadway classic, fails to engage.

Spending years in exile after banishment to Australia on false charges, Benjamin Barker, a.k.a., Sweeney Todd (Depp), returns to London seeking revenge against corrupt politician Judge Turpin (a fine Alan Rickman), who stole his wife and daughter and cast him into hell. He sneaks into town, opening a skid-row barbershop above the meat pie store of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), a down-on-her-luck cook churning out insect-ridden pot pies. Both are outsiders to the world until hatching a plan that gets business booming—courtesy of a very special new ingredient.

Their companionship has a sensible symmetry and along with an orphan (Ed Sanders) in tow, they form, to say the least, a functionally dysfunctional family. Murder after bloody murder follows, as Sweeney slashes jugulars ad nauseum in an attempt to punish society for its crimes against him while attempting to draw Turpin into his web. And Mrs. Lovett makes sure no pound of flesh goes to waste.

At the same time, Sweeney’s teenaged sidekick Anthony (androgynous Jamie Campbell Bower) falls in love with innocent Johanna (Jayne Wisener), Sweeney’s lost daughter and tightly controlled charge of the lecherous judge, raised as his daughter and now the object of his less noble intentions. Surprisingly, both young actors are inert and straight-faced, expressionless, with no heat or intensity, cracking not a smile and never convincing they are falling in love. The sweeping, would-be romantic ballad "Johanna" falls flat.

For all Burton’s love of his dark world and visceral revenge, the real shock in Sweeney Todd is Sondheim’s score, loaded with overblown songs that are simply not very memorable. They may be clever. They may be exceedingly well constructed. But not a single one manages to touch our emotions. On and on they go, sounding very similar, loaded with exposition, plot and irony, and lacking in what a musical needs most: heart. Depp and Bonham Carter circle each other, corpses pile up in the impressively monumental sets while the music swells and the blood sprays the lens. Frankly, it’s boring by the halfway point.

The look of the film—dark, mono-blah variations of gray—is drab throughout, and while Burton manages a lot of bright red splashes and one fantasy sequence of seaside color, the washed-out tones rob the film of visual life.

Depp is, well, Depp, singing in decent voice and expressive as usual, and Bonham-Carter, always dependable and often more so, is a likable Mrs. Lovett—attractive, cunning and in one memorable scene, maternally torn between her own hide or that of her new son. But moments like this are very few, and very far between in Sweeney Todd, and Burton, for all his fascination with Todd’s madness and vengeance, forgets that in all this death, there must also be some life.

I felt nothing.

- Lee Shoquist