Review: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tim Burton promised blood, and blood he delivers. When the incredible tension anticipating Sweeney’s first kill is finally cut, Burton’s slit-throat ballet is grisly and poetic, a Grand Guignol used to often haunting effect. Blood, so central to the visual vocabulary Burton employs to tell the story, is the only vivid splash in an otherwise dark and gloomy world – London. More Gotham than Gotham, the film’s London is an irredeemably corrupt black hole in the titular character’s eyes and, by extension, our own. Blood is the life, as the adage goes, and when it spills, the eventual loss of that colour to the oppressive black and blues of Dariusz Wolski’s gorgeous cinematography makes the spilling all the more shocking. It speaks highly of Burton that the screen violence normally to be deplored as gratuitous and exploitative is here found to be aesthetically necessary. One of the film’s final shots, involving the sensual flow and dripping of blood from a cut throat, is so well executed it stands as a perfect example of Burton’s mastery of film as a visual medium.
How, Why Impact Stops Short
Yet for all the lush immersiveness of the world Burton constructs – a sensory near-overload as mercilessly bleak as the story – “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a film I wanted to love more than I actually did. Maybe it’s Stephen Sondheim’s music, which took me out of the film when it failed to engage me. That can be overlooked, however, considering how the film doesn’t quite succeed in delivering the walloping emotional impact it should have, a problem due to shallow characterizations and a propensity for telling rather than showing. The climax, where a confluence of forces results in a bloody collision of tragic proportions, suffers from Burton’s rushed pace and the script’s failure to let the characters truly react to their situations. Example: Sweeney Todd bleats a pathetic “What have I done?” upon learning the full scope of the tragedy, but however haunting the sanguinary tableau subsequently (and quickly) presented to us by Burton, it takes more than symbolism and shorthanded words to plumb the depths of the character’s agonized essence.
“Sweeny Todd” is, of course, a morality play, however schlocky the story of a vengeful (and then some!) barber who cuts the throats of his victims and disposes of the bodies in an opportunistic friend’s meat pies. (Think “Titus Andronicus” rather than “Hamlet.”) Yet the suspicion that much is missing – cut, perhaps, from the film’s musical source – is inescapable. The beggar woman, for example, is a key character barely given any screen time. And two young lovers are left dangling in the abrupt ending.
The Missing Element
It’s the potential underlying Sweeney Todd’s character, however, that most obviously suggests that something important is missing – depth. In a way emblematic of the banality of evil, the murderous Todd is all the more horrific for the sympathy generated by the wrong done to him. Throw in a view of society as wholly corrupt, based on Todd learning that his wife was raped by the evil Judge Turpin (Rickman) while onlookers did nothing to help, and we have in Todd’s character a moral critique that brings to mind the French anarchist terrorist Emile Henry. His rationale for bombing a Parisian café in 1894: The café’s clientele, through its support of the existing order, was as much a part of the bourgeoisie exploiting the suffering working classes as the bourgeois owners themselves. Thus, they were equally valid targets for revolutionary violence. It’s a chilling chain of reasoning that Henry held onto, even to his bitter end at a guillotine’s blade.
But the film doesn’t get close to examining, let alone embodying, issues more complex than Todd’s desire to avenge himself on the judge. Sweeney Todd, so contemptuous of humanity, could be even more provocative than a “mere” serial killer: he could be a terrorist. With straightforward and simple character motivations, however, all we get a straightforward tragedy in a straightforward film with hints of something greater.
My lack of adoration, however, doesn’t mean I find the film unworthy of appreciation. With fine, if not earth-shattering, singing and often delicious performances, “Sweeney Todd” is a cinematic treat whose disappointment is acute, but certainly not the final word. At its less than best, it is simplistic. But at its best, “Sweeney Todd” is a far more forceful and visceral denunciation of evil and injustice in the world than even the much-vaunted “No Country for Old Men.”
Entertainment Value: ** (out of two)
Technical Quality: ** (out of two)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John Logan, based on the musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, adapted from the play by Christopher Bond. 117 minutes. Rated R (for graphic bloody violence).