Director’s Cut
Here’s the thing: Tim Burton has pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative, cast nonsingers in the principal roles, and produced something magical. His Sweeney Todd isn’t a groundbreaking or innovative piece of filmmaking, but it’s as fully satisfying a screen version of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s grand guignol operetta as one can imagine. It’s the first new-millennium musical to succeed both musically and cinematically. Burton breathes new life into the genre by dousing it in buckets of blood.
When it opened on Broadway in 1979, Sweeney Todd must have felt like a groping proletarian hand under the starched evening wear of the respectable musical crowd, what with all the pederasts, raving-mad beggar women and enterprising cannibals parading across the stage of the Uris Theatre. Then there was Sweeney himself, the vengeful tonsorial terror, enthusiastically declaring, “They all deserve to die!” Reportedly, a good chunk of the first preview audience filed out at intermission, never to return.
Long before he came to the Great White Way, however, Sweeney Todd was a movie star. The character’s origins date back to mid-19th-century literature, but the story owes its contemporary popularity to British director George King’s 1936 nonmusical film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring aptly named leading man Tod Slaughter. Back then, Sweeney Todd was just a psycho who robbed wealthy customers of their valuables while his neighbor, the baker Mrs. Lovett, ground up their entrails to make her popular meat pies. Then, in 1973, the playwright Christopher Bond (whose text served as the template for Sondheim and Wheeler) endowed Sweeney with a tragic backstory: a beautiful wife, a powerful judge who fancied her for himself, and false criminal charges that earned the barber a dozen years in an Australian penal colony. Thus, from madman to misunderstood antihero.
Now Burton has given Sweeney Todd back to the movies. Nothing about the world of the film will surprise Burton connoisseurs — Dante Ferretti’s elaborate (and partly CGI), monochromatic sets might have been constructed with Sleepy Hollow leftovers, and the casting has more than a touch of the familiar to it. As the lovelorn Mrs. Lovett, Helena Bonham Carter is so animated, you’d be forgiven for mistaking her for her stop-motion counterpart in Burton’s 2005 Corpse Bride. And when Johnny Depp, as Sweeney, swings his razor high and shouts, “At last, my arm is complete again,” we’re reminded that this isn’t the first time he has played a social misfit with shiny metal at the end of his upper extremities.
As was the case for the Coen brothers and their No Country for Old Men, working with such inviolable source material has renewed Burton and his grasp on classical film storytelling after several recent works (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that verged on the precious and self-plagiarized. He shoots the movie almost entirely in close-up, like the silent classics, bringing out an intimacy in the material that sometimes gets dwarfed on the stage.
Working with screenwriter John Logan (and input from Sondheim himself), Burton has also come up with inventive ways of both condensing and expanding Sweeney for the screen, elegantly shortening songs and visualizing flashback scenes that previously existed only in the audience’s imagination. Some theater purists at the press screening I attended grumbled that such devices “literalized” the play in an unfortunate manner. I would argue that they give the movie its cinematic brio.
If Sweeney Todd startles moviegoers today the way it did theatergoers in the ’70s, it’ll be less because of Burton’s extravagantly stylized bloodletting than the fact that the story is — unlike most movie musicals — told almost entirely through song. And not just any songs, mind you, but Sondheim’s brilliantly dissonant libretto, in which burlesque ditties about cockney resourcefulness go hand in hand with arias of loneliness, despair and bloodlust. That music has been superbly reorchestrated for the film by one longtime Sondheim collaborator, Jonathan Tunick, and performed by a 64-piece orchestra under the direction of another, Paul Gemignani.
The singing is neither brilliant nor blasphemous. Sondheim has always maintained that he prefers actors who sing over singers who act, which is what he gets here in Depp (who occasionally sounds like an emo rocker) and Carter (who has the most difficult songs and swallows some lyrics as though they were bits of Mrs. Lovett’s pies).
No matter how hard Hollywood tries, it’s folly to think that a second golden age of the American film musical is ever going to materialize. So the existence of Sweeney Todd seems all the more cause for celebration. It’s a macabre holiday treat that not everyone in the family is sure to enjoy.
