Burton Was Born to Direct This

Rating: 9/10 (23 December 2007)

Sweeney Todd has been in my life for 28 years, and Stephen Sondheim even longer. I read the first part of an acquaintance's review last week and had to stop. But I was thrilled that this extremely opinionated person was throwing out the superlatives left and right.
This is an absolutely beautifully-executed, exquisitely dark and brooding adaptation of the Broadway musical. I'm afraid the gorgeous music and poignancy, power, and creativeness of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics will be lost on many viewers, who will titter, as a few young women did in the audience I sat with, and lose the story that is being told here.
Tim Burton, bless him, has made his actor/singers into naturalistic (at least far more naturalistic than the stage version) recognizable human beings, turning down the melodrama and Grand Guignol of the stage to the quiet, chilling and at times passionate despair of Sweeney Todd, embodied with every fiber of his being by Johnny Depp. Depp is a slight man but he fills up the screen with power, and you can see every year of the 15 years Todd suffered for a crime he didn't commit, losing his wife and child in the process.
Depp fares better with the singing duties than others in the cast, with perhaps the exception of Johanna, but even the version of Green Finch and Linnet Bird here is scaled down to sweetly pretty. In a very demanding role, his voice is expressively sweet, rough, raspy and robust as needed.
Helen Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett is at least in striking range of her desire to have a relationship with Todd. As embodied by HBC, Lovett is utterly delusional and a cold, conniving businesswoman at the same time, and later shows herself to have a heart when it comes to Toby, the boy she's taken in. But she can turn on a dime and Bonham-Carter takes full advantage of every twist and turn.
Another thing that I noticed is that, with the exception of the Beadle, everyone in this cast is younger than usually seen in the musical. Again, painstaking lengths have been gone to, ensuring believability over melodrama.
Burton also doesn't stint on the violence, which is only hinted at on stage. The juxtaposition of more naturalistic singing and acting (none of the singing here is particularly operatic as it is on stage which is all to the good of this film) only enhances the means by which Todd exacts his revenge, not only those who wronged him but on all humanity. The gushers of blood condemn Todd for the very things he rails against as they provide him with much needed relief for his torment.
The film is a morality tale, to be sure. No one comes out of Sweeney Todd unscathed. Even his daughter, who is 16 on his return, has been imprisoned by the very debauched lecher, a judge, who had Todd "transported" and is haunted by ghosts of the past. Sweeney Todd is the voice of all people wronged, all people who have loved and had that love wrenched away, all of us who are haunted or tormented by ghosts of the past. Sweeney Todd shows us that revenge may have momentary pleasure but in the end, it will only destroy you.
This movie will haunt me for a long time.