He served a dark and a vengeful god

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2007)

WARNING--the below contains SPOILERS, particularly for those not familiar with the original stage show.
I'm not even going to try to be objective: I loved this movie. No, it wasn't the same as the stage show at all, but it succeeded much better than it would have had it tried to be another "filmed play" version. The decision of which numbers to cut to take an hour out of the show was judicious. Much of the love story between Johanna and Anthony is given short shrift, which is great--in most plays, the young lovers are the least interesting characters. I was a bit sorry that "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" was not sung in the movie, but although it's a great song, it is very stage-bound and was better left out. Burton did choose to use its tune as background music, over the credits and elsewhere. (Its ominousness/"Dies Irae" riff means this decision probably worked as well for those not familiar with the show as those who are.) The fact that Burton made a movie rather than a filmed play also really helped the number "By the Sea," which comes off as overlong and a bit boring on the Broadway soundtrack. Freed from its staging, the song is hilarious and doesn't drag a bit. In fact, it much better accomplishes its purpose--showing the contrast between Mrs. Lovett's feelings and imagination and Sweeney's attitude about it all--than in the play.
Depp's Sweeney, of course, is pitch perfect, with equal parts pathos, psychopathology and comedy. Bonham Clark's Mrs. Lovett is very different from former interpretations, and I'm not sure something wasn't lost here--I missed, for example, the Angela Lansbury Lovett's seeming(?)love for young orphan Toby, which chillingly vanishes when convenient. Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall were brilliant choices for the judge and beadle characters, and Sasha Baron Cohen's Pirelli is both hilarious and effective. (He's the first character to die; thus the balance of comedy and our desire to see those who deserve punishment get it has to be established with him.) The singing is, well, adequate. It succeeds even though we're not listening to opera-quality voices because nobody sings much better or worse than anyone else. The problem comes with some of the numbers that are sung very fast and/or dialectically, as conversations with overlapping speakers. It takes amazing diction to sing such numbers such that every word can be understood, and Burton's cast wasn't always equal to the task.
Like No Country for Old Men, Sweeney is a perfect marriage of director and subject matter. Burton's eye for dark but thoroughly imagined settings is a dead-on match for Sondheim's misanthropic, revenge-bent Todd and "black pit" of a London where children are executed and human bodies are baked into meat pies.
A few caveats: This is a musical that contains so little spoken dialog it might as well be called an opera. If you don't like musicals, you'll have a hard time enjoying this movie--although Jonathan, who hates musicals, liked it anyway. Also, Burton gives every throat-cutting in the script (and there are many) a cadmium-red- spurting Grand Guignol treatment that's appropriate- -even funny when it ought to be--but perhaps a bit disturbing for some viewers.
This film succeeds at doing the same thing the show does--attaining a perfect mix of horror, social justice, and comedy, but does so, as Sir Lancelot might say, in its own idiom.