Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Film Review of Tim Burton's Gothic Masterpiece from 2007
Sep 27, 2009
Tim Burton has for over 20 years made movies at once comic and comical (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), and animated and surreal (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory); but, it was Ed Wood in 1994 that made many sit-up and take notice of a filmmaker that can wield a powerful theatrical baton to enrich his remarkable cinematic flair.
Burton soul-mate Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd is the dark duo’s fifth film together) slices and dices his way through the brilliant and bloody musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with a nicely calibrated voice to match his entertainingly operatic presence.
Blood Curdling Drama
What exactly is blood-curdling? Webster’s definition of curdle: to change into curd; coagulate; congeal; so, something so horrifying, so shocking, that one’s blood actually congeals.
Helena Bonham-Carter plays Mrs. Lovett; she owns a meat pie shop on Fleet Street in London. Mrs. Lovett makes The Worst Pies in London, and still she encourages Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) to try one.
Sweeney Todd having just come back to London after years in prison was not privy to the baking of the meat pie Mrs. Lovett placed before him; he has no way of knowing whether the cockroach Mrs. Lovett squashed with her rolling pin is contained within the gray-gooey mass oozing from the flaky crust.
But, Sweeney Todd does indeed try the pie, all the while observing the surroundings he once knew as lovely and inviting, now black and bleak.
Of course, prior to entering Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pie Shop, Sweeney Todd mused there’s no place like London to his fellow traveler Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower).
Anthony Hope, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed is the thing with feathers of which Emily Dickenson wrote, and of which shares his name; and Sweeney Todd quickly quashes Anthony’s great expectations of a London full of opportunity and grandeur by explaining,
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it...
For you see, Sweeney Todd was once a respected member of society, the most popular and best barber in all of London, with a wife and a young daughter; until something dreadful happened,
There was a barber and his wife.
And he was beautiful...
A proper artist with a knife,
but they transported him for life.
But, alas Sweeney Todd will have his revenge on those who wrongfully imprisoned him; by opening a barber shop and cutting heads, literally. One by one, Sweeney Todd will lure his victims into his shop and bleed them dry.
All of Sweeney Todd’s bloody mayhem will intersect with the noble young Anthony Hope’s search for love and happiness in the bleak city; as well as Mrs. Lovett’s suddenly thriving meat shop, which began to hop when she found a source for a higher grade of meat.
Sweeney Todd is romantic and dark, scary and beautiful, and simply a pleasure to experience.
Tim Burton’s Dark Legacy
Tim Burton’s dark legacy was long ago solidified with gloriously gloomy Gothic treats like Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Ed Wood (1994), and Sleepy Hollow (1999).
With Sweeney Todd, Mr. Burton may well have marked his name in blood across the pantheon of the dark arts by appealing to yet another rabid group of creative souls: the black-clad patrons that haunt musical theatre.
What truly elevates Sweeney Todd above anything else Tim Burton has created prior, is the deep emotional power of Sondheim’s music and lyrics; there is an undeniable melancholia that flows throughout every scene and every song.
Tim Burton is an artist that understands there is a deep current of sadness and pain that runs beneath the darkest of souls; and it’s to the great pleasure of Burton’s fans that with Sweeney Todd he has been able to fully bring this beautiful thing to fruition; It’s as if everything that’s come before in Mr. Burton’s repertoire has been dress-rehearsal for this, his most powerful work.
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