An Eye-Rolling Insult To Sweeney Todd

Rating: 2/10 (15 May 2017)

Goddammit Tim, must you ruin *everything* that's good? The original Broadway production and score of Sweeney Todd are brilliant and nuanced, balancing subtle notes of humor and horror, tenderness and savagery, lightness and dark, often within singular characters. Burton just suffocates it all in black tar and stage blood with all the sophistication and discernment of a 13-year-old suburbanite giggling at slasher comics in his basement.
It is clear that Burton didn't really want to make a musical in the first place and thus all the numbers come off as reluctant obligations rather than the vital organs of the film. Additionally, if you are going to make a musical, it is important that your actors can actually bloody SING! Depp employs a bad alt-rock whine while Helena Bonham Carter deadpans/talks her way through what are supposed to be giddy, effervescent, and funny songs with the bored resignation of a corpse bride waiting for her paycheck. Considering the heartbreaking beauty, dynamism, and texture of the original score, this rendering comes across as merely a self-serving insult to its source.
It is thus difficult to call Burton's Sweeney an "interpretation" when it is such a tone-deaf butchering on so many levels. As suggested earlier, Mrs. Lovett was originally written as a goofy, overeager, dim-witted bubble of a woman who counterbalances Sweeney's brooding menace. Here, Carter squelches her into the iron bodice of her austere ennui and creates just an equally brooding bedhead who glibly tosses Mrs. Lovett's $100 lines into the toilet as though the whole point of her character and the script were boring her to death. Depp's performance seriously lacks depth as well, coming across as Mr. Mean Looney-Pants the entire time rather than a suffering man with a deadly secret who has any real vengeance to seek. The sailor, who is supposed to be an embodiment of virile safety and valor, was for some unidentifiable reason cast as a twelve year old-looking boy rather than a capable man who could actually "steal" Johanna away. Plus, his and Johanna's songs together were cut, neutering their relationship and the urgency of their union. Johanna sits and sings her liberation-desire song while sewing and looking bored. The judge is rendered Mr. EvilEVilEVIL rather than the cluelessly gross man who actually thinks his adopted daughter would willfully marry him. Nearly every decision made, casting and otherwise, was amateurishly wrong and undermined the integrity and effectiveness of the story.
If you want REAL Sweeney Todd, see the Angela Lansbury production on DVD and listen to the original cast recording (or find a capable live production, such as the excellent one currently at Barrow Street Theater in New York) and let this dumb, ham-fisted, kiddie-goth misfire rot in the dollar bin where it belongs.