Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I don’t think I was alone, walking into Sweeney Todd, in feeling like I was issuing an ultimatum. Screw this up, I thought, and we’re through, Burton. Like vast swathes of my generation, I grew up on Tim Burton’s early movies, and have continued to love them even though growing up has brought an awareness of their numerous flaws (with the exception that the bookends of the Classic Burton era, 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and 1994’s Ed Wood, are both as near perfect as any movie I have seen). After 1994, though, the man seemed to lose it, precipitously, and while most of his movies after had their moments, some of them just plain didn’t. What was missing was the joy of the art that had been so evident before; even the best moments in a Mars Attacks (Ack! Ack!) can’t make up for the fact that the director just doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself.

Judging by Sweeney Todd, that joy is back. From the very beginning of the brilliant opening credits sequence, it’s evident in every frame. It finds its greatest expression in the blood that pours all over the place in the movie, blood that looks and behaves like no real blood ever did. Every slit throat is different. Sometimes the blood pours, sometimes it leaks, often it spurts. And that’s not enough for Burton. With every murder, when Johnny Depp’s perfect Sweeney pushes the foot pedal that tilts the chair back and sends the body falling into the basement to be ground and cooked into a meat pie, we see the body fall from a new angle. We watch it from above, we watch it from below, we watch it from all sides—and of course Burton ensures that all the bodies hit the ground head first. And we laugh approvingly every time.

Every aspect of the movie is similarly unrestrained. The whole thing, blood aside, is drenched in a dingy darkness, the kind Burton traditionally excelled at, to the point where, when about halfway through Helena Bonham Carter’s perfect Mrs. Lovett sings about her fantasy life with Sweeney by the sea, we are temporarily blinded by the brightness of a cloudy day and some blue outfits. In less steady hands, this material would bog down under the weight of its own gloom. Instead, the gloom raises it up to giddy heights.

Like all the best movies based on stage musicals, Sweeney Todd claims the film medium as its own, and takes advantage of it like few movies do. From the quick cuts that allow Sweeney to murder more people on screen than on stage to the loving camera-led journeys through London, “filled with people who are filled with shit” more convincingly than ever before, Burton fills his movie with moments that belong entirely to cinema. This stage show has been thoroughly adapted.

Stephen Sondheim’s music, freed from the constraints of Broadway’s preferred singing style (strident, yet studiedly bland), reveals itself as surprisingly good, and the vocal performances by Carter and Depp, though perhaps lacking in technical mastery, possess far more emotional impact than any stage belter could convey (with all due respect to Angela Lansbury, her Mrs. Lovett leaves much to be desired in comparison). And perhaps the single best difference between the stage version and this film version is that Burton has eliminated the chorus. He’s kept that wonderful dramatic musical flourish that Sondheim cribbed from a Gregorian chant (and before the Chant craze of the 90s, too!), but eliminated the crowds of anonymous city folk singing to the audience about the story. Smart move—in a story as insular as this, crowds of people have no business intruding. This is a story of one man who has lost all agency, driven to a burst of violent, nihilst glory in his attempt to reclaim it, to force those up above to serve those down below.