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Sweeney agonistes

Sondheim and Burton create a masterpiece
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 6th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Sweeney Razorhands. Johnny Depp in song and blood in Burton's film.
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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Directed by Tim Burton
With Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Timothy Spall, Ed Sanders, Jamie Campbell Bower and Jane Wisener

Had a more tuneful Charles Dickens been a Jacobean playwright, he might have invented the Sweeney Todd story — and a bloody, merciless tale it is, too. Sweeney is the demonic London barber who slashed the throats of customers so that his downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, would have a fresher supply of meat for her savory pies.
The story first appeared in the19th-century in street-hawked penny dreadfuls, then staggered its way into musical hall balladry (Dickens references the story in Martin Chuzzlewit). Later there were a few silent film versions, and then a 1936 Sweeney Todd from the Shepperton Studios in England, starring that too-perfectly named Edwardian ham Tod Slaughter.
It was Stephen Sondheim’s musical from 1979 that finally wove this tabloid yarn into art, with a score that quickly earned his slasher operetta space on the same opera house boards as The Barber of Seville. With writers Hugh Wheeler and Christopher Bond, Sondheim wrought a saga of fierce obsession and vengeance that rivaled any Jacobean revenge tragedy of Ford or Webster. It’s a tale as much powered by malign energy as sinister whimsy.
Tim Burton is really the only director who could have inhabited the Gothic Revival gallowscape of Sondheim’s dark musical as if it were home. His version of Sweeney Todd (made with Sondheim’s blessings) is, at last, the masterpiece of the modern movie musical, currently enjoying its own revival.
Burton is a master of decrepitude and gloom. The first image in Sweeney Todd is the only establishing shot we’ll need to set the film’s scene: London wearing a coal fog like a ratty negligee.
Benjamin Barker, aka Sweeney (Johnny Depp), disembarks from a ship near Tower Bridge after escaping transportation to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit. His savior, a young seaman named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), will later come to him for his own rescue.
The self-christened Sweeney, a barber by trade, makes his way through the crooked, dank streets to his old shop, perched above a hunger-bitten pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who proudly boasts of making the worst pies in London. Sweeney resumes his career, but with only one purpose: to seek revenge against his false accuser, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman).
Burton has a ruthless eye. His period streets almost reek of manure and piss, and his people appear as crypt escapees, with faces like chalk or suet masks complete with sunken eyes and mutinous teeth. Many of these souls will go missing, but will never be missed. Their lot is to be buried in pies, and Mrs. Lovett’s satanic bakery will start belching acrid smoke as business begins to boom.
The greatest surprise in Burton’s film is in having cast actors not known as singers, and finding them all to be not only game, but rather good. Depp’s Sweeney, a grim fop, has a glam rock baritone lighter than is called for, but possesses a strong, natural delivery. Bonham Carter’s contralto is occasionally bested by the famously treacherous rapidity in Sondheim’s lyrics, and the actress swallows a few words. Still, she’s excellent in the part that may finally (like her role in Fight Club) overthrow her Merchant-Ivory past of porcelain heroines.
The real finds are among the newcomers, who are all genuine singers. Campbell Bower’s Anthony Hope is beautifully realized as an emotionally vulnerable young lover. Jane Wisener, as Sweeney’s lost daughter Johanna (and the love of Anthony), is equally impressive, and performs the song “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” perfectly.
Toby Ragg, the Dickensian workhouse urchin, is much younger in Burton’s film, and young Ed Sanders easily commands his scenes with both Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, who expertly takes on the oily Pirelli. Sanders is an Artful Dodger just waiting for a new staging or filming of Oliver!
Songs have been slashed in this blood-drunk epic, as many as necks left split and spilling. The chorus has been dismissed, so the various reprisings of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” are left to the orchestra. Some other favorites, such as “Parlor Songs,” have been cut. “A Little Priest,” which remains, is far too overstaged.
Yet this remains Sondheim’s work even with Burton’s bleak aesthetic cloaking it. Sweeney Todd is Guignol at its grandest.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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