Warts and all, this may be the best movie musical since "Cabaret"

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2008)

Twice before the cinema has massacred Mr Sondheim. In 1966 Richard Lester brought "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" and chopped it up like "The Knack" on speed. In the seventies, Hal Prince, (great on Broadway but something of a dodo in the cinema), made a version of "A Little Night Music" that was so wooden it could have been a Davenport. So was it any wonder my heart sank when I heard that Tim Burton, that most idiosyncratic of directors, was to film "Sweeney Todd", arguably Sondheim's greatest, and certainly his most ambitious, work with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter in the leading roles. (Neither player has a reputation for singing and Burton has been producing more misses than hits recently).
So first the good news; it is so much better than I had dared hope. This is no slavish reproduction of the stage show but a fairly radical reinterpretation for the cinema and that means not just tightening things up but cutting songs as well. Purists may balk and as a purist, on occasions, I did but there is so much here that is true to the spirit of Sondheim's original that, more often than not, inwardly I wanted to cheer. Burton, for the most part, has pulled it off.
The bad news is that it is not the masterpiece it might have been. It isn't the penchant for blood, of which there is a lot, or the Hammer horror trappings. After all, it is the tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, so what do you expect! Rather it's that Burton loses his grip in crucial moments. The climax feels rushed and overdone; he totally misses the comedy of 'A Little Priest', the one occasion where the musical-comedy should far outweigh the darker elements. And then there is the casting. This may be the greatest of all movie musicals, (and it is probably the best movie musical since "Cabaret"), in which neither of the leading players can sing and since "Sweeney Todd", in its original state, is close to being an opera, that is something of a handicap.
And yet Depp, Bonham-Carter and Alan Rickman, (as Judge Turpin), perform brilliantly. Despite their lack of a musical training they know exactly what is required of them; for a good deal of the time I was oblivious to the fact that they weren't singing all that well because they were acting so superbly. Depp just gets better with every picture; that he has now added a full-blown musical to his CV speaks volumes of his versatility. (OK, so he's not Len Cariou but he's a damned fine actor). Bonham-Carter, too, has probably never been better on screen. Her Mrs Lovett is sexy, sympathetic and a monster almost simultaneously. As for Alan Rickman, he completely resists his natural urge to ham it up making Turpin a genuinely chilling and odious villain.
It also looks wonderful with Dante Ferretti's splendid set design and Dariusz Wolski's sepia-toned cinematography adding depths it never had on the stage. Perhaps it's failings have more to do with Burton's ambition; his attempts at doing things differently, in deviating from the original score on occasions, in cutting out the flannel and keeping to the basic fundamentals of the plot. Maybe in the end he simply bit off more than he could chew. And yet so much of it is magnificent that you are inclined to overlook its flaws. Yes, warts and all, this may be the best screen musical since "Cabaret". Whoever would have thought it?