Stealth Entertainment: Sweeney Todd
By Scott Lumley
November 20, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But Hollywood's loss is our gain. There is a veritable treasure trove of film out there that you may not have seen. I will be your guide to this veritable wilderness of unwatched film. It will be my job to steer you towards the action, adventure, drama and comedy that may have eluded you, and at the same time, steer you away from some truly unwatchable dreck.
Hopefully we'll stumble across some entertainment that may have slid under your radar. Wish us luck.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon barber of Fleet Street (2007)
As a disclaimer, I need to state a few things off the bat.
1) I don't like horror films. At all. There are of course the odd exceptions, like Silence of the Lambs, Henry, or Hellraiser. These are movies that are so stylishly done or completely original that they knocks my socks off. However, the majority of horror films are cinematic garbage to me. They celebrate our basest, most evil desires and add little to humanity as a whole. I know that there are veritable LEGIONS of horror film fans out there who strongly disagree with me, but I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, pornography probably adds more to the human condition than horror films ever will.
2) As much as I detest horror films, I can only but hold them in high regard when compared to musicals. Hairspray bored me, you couldn't pay me to watch High School Musical and Mamma Mia! will never, EVER see playing time in my house. The whole concept of a musical is ridiculous to me. People wandering the streets don't just randomly burst into well-choreographed song and dance routines. I find the concept of Spider-Man far more probable than a group of random people with little to no foreknowledge of each other bursting into song as they dance an intricate routine that would take a seasoned and trained dance professional three weeks to get down cold.
And after saying that, I have to take the absolute opposite approach and say that Sweeney Todd, a horror musical no less, is a truly original and highly watchable film. Nothing in this movie feels forced. It's a superbly cast, brilliantly filmed period piece about a wronged man who returns to his lost life and home and proceeds to set himself on a path of vengeance as opposed to trying to rebuild his shattered life. If there is a wrong decision to make here, he makes it.
The film stars Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall as Beadle, the chameleon like Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli and the surprisingly talented Ed Sanders as young Toby. This is some pretty good casting, with some very talented actors who are more interested in their craft than box office.
That turned out to be important, as this film didn't exactly set the world on fire. The film grossed about $50 million on a $50 million budget. The worldwide receipts made this profitable in the long term, but Sweeney Todd opened at number five at the box office and disappeared not long after that.
It really is a shame that this didn't get the recognition it deserved, because there was certainly a lot worth seeing. Depp played Todd like a truly tortured soul, so wronged by Turbin that his sanity cracks and he becomes obsessed with little more than vengeance. There's an old expression that comes into play from time to time - "He was blinded with rage." And at one point in this film Depp exemplifies this perfectly as he destroys something unknowingly that he holds so dear. It's a painful moment that had me pleading with him onscreen to stop for just a moment and look. It's not often that I engage in a movie that deeply, but Depp pulls it off masterfully, like he always does. He could have easily played this softly and tried for another Captain Jack type performance here, but he's unrelenting in portraying Todd as a monster.
The rest of the cast isn't quite up to Depp's level, but it's certainly not for lack of trying. Pirelli is a con artist played humorously by Cohen, but he plays him with a dark edge and in such a way that when Todd does get finished with him you're not upset but rather pleased. Bonham Carter nearly hangs with Depp as well, one of the few characters onscreen to not be blown away by his screen presence. Her Mrs. Lovett is a lonely, desperate soul herself, and she sees Todd as her last chance at happiness. She's so determined to live her dream that she continuously does things so monstrous that you really have to wonder who was the bigger villain here, Todd or Lovett. At least Todd has reasons for his actions, Lovett blithely wanders through carnage and calmly grinds people into meat for pies without even batting an eye. It's downright chilling watching her in the grip of her own personal obsession.
Rickman and Spall don't even come close to performances that powerful in their roles of Turpin and Beadle. Instead, their characters come off as cartoonish villains. And while this is really Spall's modus operandi (this man seems born to play a weasel.) it certainly isn't for Rickman, a fine actor who can stretch his act when he wants to. I can only assume that director Tim Burton wanted them to act that way because he wanted the focus on Todd and Lovett.
I really think Burton shows some amazing craft with this film. Of course it's beautifully costumed and filmed like every Burton film is, and Burton's usual manipulation of the color palette is on less than subtle display here, with characters so pale and bleak wandering around that you may wonder at parts of the film if these people are already dead. It's done for a reason, and it figures into the climax of the film and in a chilling twist that I really did not see coming.
That's really the brilliance of this film. It calmly shows Todd's return to London on a sailboat, returning to a city filled with possibility when viewed by another more innocent character, yet Todd is so damaged that all he can do is return to the scene of his greatest anguish and wallow in his pain. There are any number of opportunities for him to reclaim some semblance of his old life, but at every opportunity Todd goes in a different direction or ignores it altogether. Todd even learns fairly early in the film that his daughter is still alive, yet he makes no effort to reconnect with her or even try to see her, an action that is very nearly fatal to his daughter later in the film. And these decisions that he makes with so little thought save for his own pain result in the slaughter of dozens of people, most of whom have never wronged him.
It's a brutal film in this regard, and while in the beginning when Todd starts slitting throats you may applaud him, by the end you'll be just begging him to put the razor away. That's what a true horror film should be, a performance that sucks you in initially and then appalls you later on. By the time the final scene rolls around, young Toby is practically acting as your proxy as he stands there and glares at Todd with a mix of contempt and disgust.
So let me make this clear, if you're a horror film fan, Sweeney Todd has lots of blood and body parts for you. If you're a fan of musicals, Todd has lots of singing and even occasional dancing to sate you.
But if you're a fan of great and artful film, then this is a film you should have seen by now, if you don't already own it. Go watch Sweeney Todd. It's worth your time.