Review: Sweeney Todd (3/5)

Sweeney Todd doesn't get you in the gut




Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(Tim Burton):
Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman.
Running time: 117 minutes.

What would Gordon Ramsay make of Mrs Lovett’s pie shop? Cockroaches scurry about filthy counters, and the vile meat pies don’t contain anything you could call meat. So midway through Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) takes a leaf from the celebrity chef’s infamous TV programme: she relaunches her eatery. For once, fresh meat is at hand. The pies fly out of the kitchen on re-opening. A chimney out back spews a stinking black cloud, but there is no hint as to the origins of the new food. We certainly know though. The meat comes from Sweeney Todd’s barber shop upstairs. From his customers to be more precise. And the stench upsetting the neighbours is their charred remains – Sweeney slices ’em and Mrs Lovett dices ’em. Welcome to director Tim Burton’s “kitchen nightmares” – a gothic Grand Guignol of cannibalism and serial throat-cutting told almost entirely in song.
The tale of Sweeney Todd began as an urban legend in the early 19th century and has been carved into various versions over the years. This treatment comes straight from Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed 1979 Broadway musical and it hits the screen as you would imagine it – a serial killer sub-opera married to Burton’s gothic theatrics. The pace is enjoyably slow – old-fashioned in an old musical sort of way. Though there are times when Sonheim’s discordant songs feel shoehorned. Some of them could have done with a trim.
Visually, it is Burton’s best work. It opens on the deck of a ship on the Thames, overlooking a Victorian London wrapped in night fog. The city is a Dickensian nightmare, digitally tricked-up into a grey, gloomy squalor. Young sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) stands on deck beside Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp). Todd has corpse skin and cavernous eyes, with a badger’s lick to his hair. He tells us he is returning after 15 years’ hard labour in Australia for a crime he didn’t commit. The judge that framed him raped his wife, and made a ward of his young daughter. That man is Judge Turpin, a lascivious snake played with relish by Alan Rickman (who else?). His sidekick is the Beadle Bamford, played by Timothy Spall with a superb, snarling rat-face. Turpin now keeps Sweeney Todd’s daughter under lock and key (bird-like Northern Irish actress Jayne Wisener) and plans to marry her. Sailor Anthony Hope has more noble plans for this young lady too. But Todd wants only one thing – revenge – and finds a partner-in-crime in Mrs Lovett, a grimy widow who lives in his old building and who has kept his razors for him.
The first murder is a frenzy with a kettle. Sacha Baron Cohen’s rival Italian barber, all rolling Rs and camped-up theatrics, gets stuffed into a box. (“He recognised me from the old days. Tried to blackmail me. Half me earnings,” sings Depp in that familiar Cockney. “Oh, well that’s a different matter then,” says widow Lovett. For a moment there I thought you lost your marbles.”)
But Sweeney Todd soon finds a rhythm with his blades, slicing crimson neckties in swift, theatrical strokes. (Imagine if Edward Scissorhands had a cruel streak.) Blood geysers out of open throats and gleams on the floor like spilt paint. Sweeney designs a tilting barber’s chair, with a foot-switch that opens a hole in the floor. The bodies slide down a chute to the basement where they are carved for pies (and there lies a mincer with an assemblage of body parts in the feeder). This becomes a comic motif, body after body, hitting the floor downstairs with a thwump. But not all the grisly capers had me rolling in my seat. It might have been more fun if Sweeney Todd enjoyed his work, but he doesn’t, wrapped as he is in sour misanthropy.
The mood is cynical, flippant, and certainly not for the younger viewer. The chief mode of humour is schadenfreude, and this can get pretty tiring. Soon you realise murderous mayhem is not an end in itself, especially when the humour is not propping it up. This isn’t helped by Depp. His performance is committed, but he chooses to play Sweeney Todd as a sullen, damaged monster. His skin glows chalk white, but that inner luminescence never shines. He is never somebody you want to sympathise with. And why would you? He is a serial killer – even if his back story is carefully worked out to make him sympathetic.
When the story reaches its Greek tragedy-style finale, you find yourself admiring how it ends, rather than feeling any emotion. You never feel cut up – Sweeney Todd doesn’t get you in the gut.