not what it could have been

Rating: 5/10 (6 April 2009)

I'd like to imagine how good this movie could have been, say if it had been done in the 1980s. But at this point in his career Tim Burton is more slick than he is audacious, and Sondheim's musical has been around for so long that it's not really anything fresh. Certainly the performances in this film pale in comparison to the filmed play that I saw with Angela Lansbury in the role that Helena Bonham Carter plays in this film. Where Carter is all twitchy mannerisms and never appears for a second as a real human being, Lansbury played the role like a lark and ended up making it more disturbing as a result.
Carter and Johnny Depp look less like 19th Century malcontents than they do like they just dressed up to go to a Morrisey or Cure concert. Jamie Campbell Bower looks like he would last approximately 30 seconds on a ship. Totally miscast, although he seems an interesting actor perhaps in some other role. The only really bright spots on the cast were Alan Rickman (unsurprisingly) and Sacha Baron Cohen (quite surprisingly). Rickman is always great at these kind of oily characters, and he gives the judge an air of vanity that's quite disgusting. Cohen did a good job as the egotistical rival barber Pirelli.
The music itself wasn't always well served in this film. I don't know if it was just the DVD or how the film was made, but I kept having to turn the music down because it would get too loud and then turn the TV back up to hear the often whispered dialog. Some of the most memorable songs were cut out for this film too, for no real reason that I can see. I'm not a huge Sondheim fan -- the only song in this show that I really like is "By the Sea" or whatever it's called, and if I had to suffer through "Johanna" one more time in my entire life it'll make me want to slit my own throat.
Depp and Carter are called upon to hold the film together and for me they failed. Carter has no charm and Depp seems to just brood for the whole film. They look silly sitting there in the park with so much white makeup on their faces. Generally this film could have benefited from more of a contrast instead of putting everything in such muted tones. That's how a lot of movies are these days though, they get carried away with digital color filters.
This is basically a vanity project that was probably more fun to make than it was to watch.