Grand guignol at its best...meaning razors, slit throats, dripping red stuff and enough black humor to fill a cemetery

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2008)

"They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's the one staying put in his proper place and one with his foot in the other one's face. Look at me, Mrs Lovett! Look at you! No, we all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I!"
If you had any doubt, that's Sweeney Todd, and he puts his philosophy to work. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is Stephen Sondheim's re-telling of a barber driven mad. His wife and child were taken from him by a corrupt judge, who used and destroyed the wife and kept the child, who now is a young woman. Sweeney was transported, but he managed years later to return to London. While he plans his revenge on the judge he takes his revenge on humanity. He slits the throats of those he shaves. He's fortunate in meeting Mrs. Lovett, who makes a poor living making and selling awful meat pies, the main ingredient of which is pussycat. Now with Sweeney providing a constant source of fresh meat, her pies become best sellers. Sweeney finds his daughter, but retribution is inevitable. Now, twenty- eight years after Sweeney's Broadway debut, Tim Burton, with Sondheim's encouragement, has made a movie of the show.
A tragedy of revenge, as some critics have said? I'm not so sure about that...there's too much lip-smacking by Burton and Sondheim, as well as by the audience (at least the audience I was a part of) over the gore. But Sweeney Todd certainly is tops as a superb example of an engrossing, cynically humorous, fast-paced, wonderfully acted piece of flinch-inducing Grand Guignol. I enjoyed every minute of it, even while I was squinting my eyes to avoid most of the neck slitting. Even as graphic as the slicing and blood spurting was, there was something so over the top about those scenes that perhaps I'm just a softy. (But note how Sondheim mixes together the beautiful song of longing, "Johanna," with the impersonal series of throats being slit. It's startling to hear and see, and the beauty of the song nearly makes us complicit in Sweeney's on-camera blood-letting. On the stage it was even more riveting. It's a brilliant, lengthy set piece.)
All the actors, I thought, did a fine job doing their own singing. Sondheim said recently in the NYTimes that he agreed completely with the decision to cast the actors first for their acting abilities and then for their singing skills, not the other way. Bonham Carter has taken some criticism, but I think she does a perfectly fine job. She has a light voice without much power behind it...but she certainly did an excellent job with her meat pies song and her by the sea song. Her characterization of the character was excellent, I thought. Fortunately, playing Mrs. Lovett isn't a zero sum gain; I think it's perfectly reasonable to enjoy what Bonham Carter does with the role while loving the ghastly comic turn Angela Lansbury gave Mrs. Lovett on stage. It would hard to think of better actors for doing such revolting jobs as degenerates than Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall as the beadle. For me, where the movie starts to slacken a bit is toward the end, when Sondheim tries to bring a sense of real tragedy to the story. That has been a problem, as far as I'm concerned, with the stage production as well as the movie. Too obvious, too "sincere" for me. Still, without the final revelations there wouldn't be a story at all.
I saw the stage show shortly after it opened on Broadway, then again when a touring company brought it to St. Louis. My reaction then was the same as with nearly all Sondheim shows I've seen...too mannered, too overly intellectual, too clever. Then I listen to the recordings of the songs from his shows and I change my mind. Burton's movie (over which Sondheim had control over how the songs would be presented and over any cuts) seems to me to have resulted in a much more affective presentation, due to the style, the cuts and the trims, than the stage show.
And it seems to me that Johnny Depp has established himself as the most interesting and versatile American actor of his generation, probably the most talented, too. I cannot conceive of Di Caprio, Cruise, Pitt, etc., etc., being able to carry this part, much less even taking the chance and agreeing to play it.