Tim Burton's Sweeney Toddis a tunefully nasty horror musical, writes Michael Dwyer.
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jayne Wisener, Laura Michelle Kelly, Edward Sanders 16 cert, gen release, 116 min
Tim Burton says he never heard of composer Stephen Sondheim before he went to see a London stage production of Sweeney Todd, and that what attracted him to the musical was the poster, which reminded him of a horror movie.
Burton, who has long had a preoccupation with tales from the dark side, discovered fruitful material for a movie in Sweeney Todd, which he has turned into the most blood-splattered musical in cinema history.
While Sondheim's best-known compositions, such as Send in the Clowns, are lyrical in the finest Broadway musical tradition, he has enjoyed subverting the genre through his adventurous themes. One of his great achievements, Assassins, is a musical based on nine people who killed or tried to kill US presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley.
Set in 19th-century London, Sweeney Todd is a tragedy of a protagonist driven by vengeance and despair to become a mass murderer. The flashbacks in Burton's film depict Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp), as a young barber, blissfully happy with his wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly) and their young daughter.
Their idyllic lives are destroyed when the amoral Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman at his nastiest) sets his lecherous sights on Lucy. He is so cruel that he casually sentences a young boy to death even though unsure of his guilt. Turpin spies Lucy at a masked ball, sentences her husband to a penal colony in Australia, and arranges for their daughter to become his ward.
The film begins when Barker returns to London after 15 years' incarceration determined to exact revenge. He visits the site of his barbershop, over the mice- infested pie store run by Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who tells him that Lucy killed herself while he was away.
Changing his name to Sweeney Todd, Barker resumes his practice as a barber. In the musical's eeriest song, he serenades his collection of cutthroat razors with the lyrics: "These are my friends. See how they glisten."
We are alerted in the opening credits sequence that there will be blood, but we are not prepared for just how copiously it will flow as throats are slit in graphic close-up. Mrs Lovett puts the corpses through a mincing machine as fillings for the pies she serves her unsuspecting customers.
Burton boldly stages the musical as Grand Guignol on a grand scale, playing out the melodrama full-tilt, and without a hint of parody, to the accompaniment of Sondheim's swelling dramatic score, itself inspired by the film soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann.
Collaborating with Polish cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Burton drains the elaborate Dickensian sets of colour to the point where the film takes on a monochrome look that's interrupted by bright red only when blood flows. The effect is startling when the movie bursts into bright, sunlit colours, as Mrs Lovett imagines a different life for herself and Todd in the song By the Sea.
The songs in Sweeney Todd are clever, witty and memorable, advancing the narrative and commenting on the characters and their behaviour. The cast, few of whom have any singing experience, act out their songs with unshowy style, and they are ideal fits for their roles.
Depp, in particular, is wonderfully intense, and even strangely sympathetic, and the film introduces a bright young talent in Ed Sanders as Toby, the gin-drinking urchin boy.
