Sweeney Todd Hits All the Right Notes

Johnny Depp puts on a wonderful performance in Edward Scissorhands 2, this sequel to Tim Burton's classic film. Excuse me if I seem a bit confused because Tim Burton behind the camera and Johnny Depp in front of it are so at home in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street that I forgot about almost everything that they have done in between. Burton has been chasing this particular Demon for years now and Depp grew into the role after a triple stint as Captain Jack. (Who knows where he got the singing voice, probably from wherever he gets his other morphing skills.) The knife fingers are traded for a barber's blades ("My friends!" Depp sings when reunited with his silver set) and the blameless naiveté has been swapped for angst-ridden revenge but one can see the similarities, though it is juxtaposed by a warped mirror.

Burton has done it again, bringing out the slickest and goriest performance in everyone involved. It seems that, while on his own Johnny Depp has proven to be a truly exceptional actor, Tim Burton brings out almost any single persona that he wants Depp to become, no matter how bizarre. The same goes for Burton's amore, Helena Bonham Carter, and the man known primarily for his pseudo Eastern European version of Allen Funt who finally puts his talent for accents to good use, Sacha Baron Cohen (no relation.)

By not overdosing on Burton's signature stylization, famed art director, Dante Ferretti, brilliantly balances the dismal detail of dreamy Londontown with ample swashes of Downtrodden Dickens and Fantastical Fellini. Stephen Sondheim's songs-though I am told they are an abbreviated selection of the original musical in this version-meld into the scenery so perfectly you almost forget that they are mostly about making meat pies from human remains. Almost, that is, because the lyrics are so much fun, especially when Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett fantasize about the potential menu in A Little Priest.

The story goes that a young barber named Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) with a perfectly gauzy life somehow gets himself into the path of a despicable Judge named Turpin, played by the ever-shady Alan Rickman. Turpin, for no other motivation than the desire to possess and ultimately destroy beauty, snatches poor Baker from his perfect life and plunks him in jail. The Judge then steals Barker's wife and little girl.

The decision to sentence Barker to fifteen years of prison instead of hanging from the gallows comes back to haunt the Judge. Barker returns from whence he was deposited to a much less attractive Londontown as he has lost his wife, child, hair-color and the view of life through rose-colored glasses he once had. What he has gained is a brilliant Pepe le Pew white stripe, a thirst for vengeance and a hatred of mankind in general if not specifically for Judge Turpin. With nothing but this on his mind (and possibly reuniting with his beloved but that is besides the point, really) Barker finds that after all these years, everything has been truly lost. At his old haunt, he runs into broken-down pie maker, the widowed Mrs. Lovett, barely making a living at selling stale, bug-ridden pies. And she knows it. They are, she sings, The Worst Pies In London.

With a view of what moves past the store window on Fleet Street, the pair make an unholy alliance whereby the One who slashes necks clean through, punishing the whole of London for his fall from grace, changing his name to Sweeney Todd in the process, provides meat in the way of human bodies to the Other One downstairs, lifting her shop up from oblivion. Meat, being expensive to come by, can turn a tidy profit if the butcher lives upstairs from you and his product is free human remains. Thus, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is born.

Glibly, they go out to establish Sweeney Todd as the preeminent barber in London, challenging a sideshow, hair-growing-elixir-selling, Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) to a duel of sorts, a duel of skill and speed at shaving. In a weird casting turn, Anthony Head, Giles from the Buffy The Vampire Slayer television show, shows up briefly as an extra "man on the street." He utters what I think is one throw away line and then disappears. For some strange reason, I kept expecting him to show up again, yet he never does. Anyway, Signor Adolfo Pirelli ends up a blackmailing fake, whose hilarious claims to have shaved the face of the Pope turn out to be as phony as his Italian accent. Todd dispatches him right quick, first victim, first serving of dead man meat pie.

They adopt his boy-servant, Toby, as their own. Toby's love song, Not While I'm Around, for Mrs. Lovett when he figures out that Todd is up to no good becomes one of the most endearingly sweet and sad songs of the movie, considering.

Don't worry, there's enough blood and gore for everyone as the necks are slashed and the characters fall deeper into love and into madness. The slashing goes on mostly during one of the tenderest songs, about Todd's lost daughter, Johanna. The dichotomy of blood spurting over the floors, Todd's sleeves, and the camera lens, against this paen to pale beauty is pretty typical stuff for the film-at the same time ironic, grotesque, funny and sad.

All along, I was rooting for the sad souls of Todd and Lovett never once really seeing or ignoring the Demon part of the title. I guess that that's the trick of the story by culling empathy for the main characters, not really ever feeling true revulsion to what they were doing. After all they were just victims of this 19th Century world where power meant that those below served those above and all the thanks they got for it was for those above to dig their heels into the lowly backs of those below even harder. Weren't Todd and Lovett just flipping the game? Wasn't it the powerful who deserved to be served up on a plate? After all, revenge is a dish best served, cold. Though in due course everyone (and I mean everyone) gets their comeuppance and the innocent are saved. It all ends up rather tidily, more so than I had reason to believe when the story began.

It feels at times, with the movie being so tightly plotted, that there is more of an epic scale to the thing. It is in the nature of a Tim Burton film to generally seem like there is more to it than we actually see, which is probably why I at least tend to revisit them time and again. Multiple viewings of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street reveal even more than at first sight; because I never had the pleasure of seeing the original on stage I can't tell if it is by Tim Burton's capable director's hand or the original writers' crafting, though I suspect it's a little of both.

Overall I have to applaud this effort. I admit that at first I feared Sweeney Todd was going to be another of Tim Burton's over-the-top Goth-fests in the vein of Corpse Bride that sounded like a good idea but missed the mark entirely. The actual result is a movie musical that delivers everything you would expect going in, and a little bit bloody more.