Grim. Gorgeous. Hooray!

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2008)

Grim. Gorgeous. Hooray! Welcome back sexy, brooding Johnny Depp. Pirate lovers go stick ya Jack Sparrow where mainstream audience appetites don't shine! Needless to say Johnny Depp's performance as Sweeny Todd is a coup. He manages to maintain an aura of absolute evil right alongside a dark eyed, soulful, tortured facial expression that keeps the audiences heart strings well and truly strung on his side of the story. This is a film that deals in heroes who are villains- in the most iconic sense of the word. Mrs Lovett is also glorious. Wild haired, dark-eyed and soulful too if a little more on the practical side where mortality is concerned. Mrs Lovett will have you eager for Sweeny's first kill with all her motherly clucking about the need for patience which delays the gratification for all concerned. She will have you roaring with laughter as you voyeuristically consider the culinary possibilities of a crowd people of various professional flavours. In short, Mrs Lovett may have you begging the question of yourself rather than Mr Todd: 'have you gone barking mad?' And somehow it is her love story that seems the most truly tragic of them all.
It is particularly satisfying that 'Sweeny Todd' does not try to encompass a period London setting of any scale or authentic grandeur. Neither does it elevate SFX beyond the demands of it's content. The rendered cityscapes establish a foreboding atmosphere and position the film in between the generic arenas of musical, horror, fairytale and myth. The colour palate of the film, black though charcoal and lighter grey with splashes of scarlet throughout, is reminiscent of shades used in Sin City. The effect is a similarly successful one of bringing to life ghoulish violence and inner pain in a stylishly graphic way. The realistic and unrealistic forms used in the film compliment each other and together bring to life a world where the natural and unnatural are inherently linked. The camera sticks close to its subjects. Big close ups create emotional intensity and as opposed to engendering a sense of claustrophobia they tantalise the viewer with a sense of forbidden intimacy. The instance where the lens gets a small spray of blood serves to highlight the moral dilemma in which the viewer has been put.
Of course, if singing ain't ever gonna be your thing then maybe this film just ain't gonna be your thing either. I can only tell you that I think the singing is good. Heart achingly so. The minor keys predominate, of course with plenty of accidentals and disharmonies to boot. Certainly it is not an easy score to sing and it is sung well. In particular the young boy impresses in this area and without even being nauseatingly talented in any sort of 'I'm a young child that has just got my break in a musical' kind of way. What's left? Ah, Alan Rickman is clearly a God. The 'good guys'? pfffft He's pretty and she's striking, in the way that we expect Tim Burton to choose an unconventional looking female beauty. A stronger actress with a more authentic voice could have improved the role of Joanna that's true. But what are actually presented as the personification of beauty in the film are the blades themselves. Held up to watery moonlight, contrasted with the cracks of the grimy mirror, winning Sweeney the opportunity to exercise his talents in Fleet Street. The blades, quite rightly, are the stars of the show.
Well done to Tim Burton, who is after all our hero and whom we love this time around for stepping up and properly ignoring the brighter side to fairy tale conventions. We love to see him wallow in the darkness; it suits his talents so very well. 'Everyone deserves to die'. There isn't anything more final than the closure offered at the end of the tale of Sweeny Todd. Except that the legacy of this film for members of it's audience may well be the worryingly persistent compulsion to hum that haunting, melancholy refrain 'I will have veeeennnngeance' whilst going about their daily tasks: housework, paying the bills..cooking.