Skip the shave

Rating: 5/10 (17 December 2011)

Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd adaptation is an interesting production to look at in terms of really delving into the intricacies and borders of where musicals and spectacles begin. The film is a grand production with a lot of flair but almost surprisingly the musical numbers seem just stylistically out of place in a way. Johnny Depp is a talented actor but I get the feeling that his musical skills were not up to par or that they were merely directed wrong in creating this character. Instead of really feeling like a musical this kind of feels like a pretentious piece of theatre.
Depp's Sweeney Todd is a boring character pure and simple. He is very static and is fixed with some really self destructive point of view the entire film. When I see any piece of dramatic narrative I want some sort of character arch and he doesn't really have one. How does this effect his singing? Well it seems that no song has weight over the other. Depp has pretty much thrown all his cards out there. We know he is insane and we know he is homicidal but these are only as good as the reason why. Why does being insane and homicidal propel you into a song at one point and not another? I think Depp is playing a caricature and a lousy one at best. I think what this film needs is a Sweeney Todd who goes on a descent into greater madness and is not foaming at the mouth like Depp is. Unfortunately, I have to think that this production is all about iconography and this might have been what hurt Depp's performance. That is what it seems to be.
Depp has always been an actor that comes up with odd voices for his characters. This Sweeney Todd character has a kind of inorganic gruffer version of Depp's voice and so that already gives a negative attribute against his singing. A choice that generally is a problem with the film is that the scale of the singing is muted and drawn back to a point where it is almost nothing more than speaking rhythmically. So, Depp just sounds like he is reciting a beat poem to music for most of his numbers. This is particularly noticeable and very disappointing in the numbers 'No Place Like London' and 'My Friends' which are supposed to be grand numbers of the show and deep insights into the character. Couple this with the fact that Depp is playing a character who pretty much only statically sings about how much he wants to slice throats and we have a problem, a very boring one dimensional musical. The music just doesn't have the weight one hopes to expect from such a storied production and an actor of the caliber of Johnny Depp.
We get a kind of boring and really pretentious musical because since the singing and acting are off most of the film is about set design and flair. When we get a bad performance from our lead Depp at the forefront of this it just makes the entire experience awkward and almost needless.