It’s been a number of weeks of on and off panicked work and then a tiny rest. Jumpstart and then off again. It’s just the way the days fell this year, and the fact that I didn’t take vacation around the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Amid that series of sloth and go, we decided to see the new Sweeney Todd film. It’s one of the plays I’d not dressed nor seen (although I’d seen a couple scenes from it on telly), and so I was taking the movie more at face value. And I knew it had Sondheim’s music to commend it (A Little Night Music was a great favorite of mine as a kid — mostly for its quips). I had to see it just for that, even if Johnny Depp was attempting singing it. (And he did a great job of it too.)
The plot is simple: a barber with a beautiful wife and baby daughter are separated when the naiive barber is sent off to a prison labor camp in Australia on trumped-up charges by a jealous judge, who has designs on the wife. 15 years later, the bitterly deranged barber returns to London and hears his wife has died and the daughter is now being pursued in marriage by the same judge, who has raised her as his ward, keeping her a prisoner in his home. His life destroyed, he seeks out his old barber shop, now above a meat pie shop, and nothing but revenge on the judge with a razor will settle his soul.
When I began to watch it, knowing musical theater’s traditions, I wondered how Tim Burton would rectify the telling of such a simple and predictable tale to the current internet-minded, twitching viewers expecting plot twists, stuff blowing up, and slasher material.
The answer is, he didn’t give a damn about that. He gave it what it needed — a classical presentation, with a few of his typically macabre and humourous touches. It ended as a stolid, bleak fable, set in a twisted Dickensian London, with an occasional jab of laughter. Every scene was ornate as a mouldering Mrs. Havisham’s table — inkblotchy,filthy, every street corner filled with danger or dread, the skies sooty with the most grim lighting possible. Everything looks pregnant with doom. People are dressed in 19th century finery, but it all looks as if it needs laundering and mending. Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop is not just dirty and dismal, it’s overrun with creepy crawlies and burgeoning disease. When they sing a comedic tune about the qualities of the meat they’ll be using for her pies (comparing the various offices of men they’ll soon be grinding up for that meat), there’s not just a theatrical romp in their madness. There’s a gluey sickness to it as well. Tim’s tale is not just dark and funny — it’s …Dark-funny-and-then-we-slit-your-throat.
I can see why some audience members complained about gore — seeing spurting blood is always a bit unnerving, even when it’s cartoon red and syrupy, as it is here. For me, it seemed more sickening to watch the dull thud of a body landing upside down from three floors into the basement. There’s a reflex that vision hits. Ouch! Euh! Ick! But it’s important for him to show you the repetition of horror. Sweeney’s madness becomes routinely everyday as the murders pile up, and that’s just the point. He’s bored with all these corpses, waiting only for the sweet revenge. It’s a tale of how darkness destroys not only those victimized by it, but the purveyors of it as well.
I must see it again for the wonderful and haunting music, that makes me want to sing every next sentence in my head out loud. If you give it the right rhythm and push it in a little melodic circle, anything can ring like a bell pealing over and over in Sondheim’s hand. And visually, I have to see the sea shore sequence again — perhaps the lightest moment in the movie. In it Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett dreams of having a tidy domestic life by the sea with Sweeney, and the site of a grimacing, depressed Depp in a 1910 striped bathing costume sitting woodenly on a blanket in the sand is hilarious enough, until you see her in a red-striped number that looks like a Degas gone psycho. My only complaint with these two actors is that they’re both so pretty they almost don’t fit the tone of the tale. I could have seen Gary Oldman as
a sunken Sweeney Todd more readily, with someone like Courtney Love as Mrs. Lovett, putting more distance between the two in terms of class distinction. But then, could you see those two on a screen set together in filming? Not!. So off we trod.
I think moviegoers who are used to the common everyday life of CSI and CGI will probably be a tad bored, but it’s still a little Victorian jewel of a theater work.
P.S. Concerning the other well-cast parts in it: Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall are predictably slimey, but classic; Sasha Baron Cohen is a delightful and funny surprise; Jamie Campbell Bower is gorgeous and appropriately innocent to Jane Wisener’s amazing fragility; and Ed Sanders who plays young Toby is a fabulous singer.
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