Excellent stage-to-screen transfer

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2007)

I'm a longtime Sondheim and "Sweeney Todd" fan, so it's hard for me to briefly sum up my thoughts about this movie version--but, if I had to, I'd just say, it's a success and I truly enjoyed it. Yes, I have some quibbles--but I'd probably have similar quibbles with any stage production; I nitpick because I like this show so much and know it so well.
The musical is based on the nineteenth-century urban legend of vengeful barber Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) who slits his customers' throats, and his accomplice Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who bakes the corpses into meat pies. Tim Burton was obviously attracted to the terrifying Gothic elements of this story (he favors the bloodletting over the cannibalism) but the characters have true passion behind them; they are not just Gothic cartoons.
Depp acts the role of Sweeney Todd very well, getting more intense, more aloof, more inhuman as the movie proceeds. But he sometimes sings in a crooning pop style that proves distracting--too modern. I prefer Mrs. Lovett portrayed as jollier, less haunted than Bonham Carter plays her, but she eventually eases into the role and finds the humor in it. The two have good duets in "My Friends" and "A Little Priest."
The distinctive supporting roles are all well cast and add texture to the movie. For a sadistic, villainous judge and his unctuous assistant, what current British actors are better than Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall? For the young lovers, I enjoyed seeing a Johanna (Jayne Wisener) who really looked just 16 years old and a teenage Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) to pair with her. It was also great to finally see Toby played by a young boy, the talented Ed Sanders. Usually onstage this role is filled by a grown man who has to act mentally retarded; a real child engages your sympathy more, like something out of a Dickens novel. And Sacha Baron Cohen provides a hilarious cameo as a vainglorious barber who employs Toby.
Tim Burton exercises his usual meticulous control over the look of the film, bleaching out almost all color from the production design so that the gushing red blood shows up better. His Victorian London is its own sooty, industrial, sordid world (though I think he borrows his initial winding-through-the-streets shot from Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge"). The few brightly colored flashback and fantasy sequences, especially Mrs. Lovett's song "By the Sea," are a nice contrast.
People like me may regret the loss of some clever Sondheim songs, but the cuts in the movie version make sense: when you're watching it, it feels like a complete work of art. More importantly, the stage show "Sweeney Todd" already had some cinematic aspects to it, and the movie allows them to be realized more fully. In a song like "Johanna," Sweeney sings tenderly of his lost daughter while slitting throats, Anthony wanders the streets searching for his lost love, Mrs. Lovett bakes pies, and a crazed Beggar Woman prophesies doom. The use of intercutting and montage, along with the beautiful and complex song, is the best that movies and musical theater can provide.