Tim's New Ghost's Eye

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2007)

Oh lovely day! Here is a Hollywood romance that I hope lasts.
Two aspects of this production: the magical triangle of Burton, Depp, Carter, and the music of Sondheim. The latter I'm not familiar with, outside of those Madonna-sung torch numbers in "Dick Tracy." The music here is fine, I suppose, but the musical is just canvas, anyway. It's that first aspect that excites me.
It's easy to accuse Burton of being more a production designer than a valid film director, but when compelling visions of alternate worlds in the cinema are so infrequent, need that be a bad thing? He's a man whose work I decided to follow from early age and it's a film-going relationship that's been peppered with a few successes and some appealing failures (his low point was "Planet of the Apes"). With his design-first mentality, his cinematic approach is one that appeals to me: matters of story and character are secondary to the development of engaging film environments, ones worth the consideration of our time and our willingness to enter.
Yes, it doesn't always click, as he hasn't consistently integrated movement and coherence with his elaborate set-work. But he's getting better, and this is his most accomplished film since the two Batman movies, anomalous achievements considering he neither matched nor topped either in the last fifteen years.
I think partner Carter and friend Depp are instrumental in this evolution. Helena's always been a lively and intelligent actress, and her collaborations with Burton find them seeking out meat worthy of her supporting talent and his artistic growth. Added to this is the allure of watching a filmmaker construct loving visual tributes to his significant other. See the way Helena is photographed here, exuding that unorthodox but undeniable sensuality of hers, quite apropos for the Burton style but not a grotesque transformation of her image. Rather, he draws out a beauty heretofore muted, even when she was being similarly appraised through the lens by ex-boyfriend Branagh.
Depp is here in all his introspective glory. He's usually been the one at the forefront of Tim's ventures down the more intriguing paths.
Together, the three of them descend on Sondheim -- highly melodramatic, quite predictable -- and turn it into a feast of multiple projections of reality. Depp as barber and as actor who invents a past idea of the barber as anything but the vengeful ghoul, tangling with Carter as lovelorn vamp who secretly controls and motivates actions in the plot. Burton assuming the stance of Depp's imagined ghost (that of the tormented "dead" wife), always in the odd corners of every scene, observing from all angles, freeing the theatrical environment from the limits of its stage origin, and then intruding at the climax with the driving hammer of fate. We as audience have the option of moving anywhere among these multiple vantages, all pooled into a coherent world of Victorian goth, probably Burton's most coherent evocation to date. We can be predator or prey. Rickman, Cohen, Spall, the young lovers, the boy -- all simply the prey.
Burton's eye here is highly architectural, very Langian. If you've never attached yourself to this man's work, now may be the time. I anticipate great things from here on.
Blake's rating: 3 (out of 4)