A Holiday Blood Feast With Burton
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Just in time for the holiday season comes the latest movie from Tim Burton, “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” Mr. Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” has become a delightful Christmas classic, and here he reunites with eccentric Johnny Depp to bring Stephen Sondheim’s hit Broadway musical to the big screen. Judging by the trailers, it’s a great big Yuletide treat: a song-filled, Victorian melodrama — “A Christmas Carol” for goths.
Well, imagine that you’ve gone to see your child’s Christmas pageant and when the lights go down you suddenly find that the troublemakers have taken over the show and they’re performing a stage adaptation of “Blood Feast,” complete with scalpings and tongues yanked out by their roots. On a technical level, it’s a stunning achievement, but as holiday fare goes, it’s a bit traumatic. And that’s Mr. Burton’s “Sweeney Todd” all over. It’s the kind of holiday film that will make your children gibber with fear rather than giggle with glee.
Starting life as a tabloid legend in 18th-century London, Sweeney Todd was supposedly an evil hairdresser who slit his customers’ throats and, in an act of homicidal synergy, handed their corpses over to a neighboring shop owner, Mrs. Lovett, who baked them into lovely meat pies. After several film and stage versions, Christopher Bond adapted the Sweeney Todd story into a stage play in 1973, giving the character a sympathetic backstory (his wife was so attractive that a local judge falsely imprisoned Todd, then known as Benjamin Barker, and shipped him off to Australia so as to win her) and tacking on an extraneous pair of sweet young lovers. A few years later, Stephen Sondheim adapted the play into his Grand Guignol musical, assaulting the audience with sharp lyrics and constantly holding out the promise of a hummable melody before yanking it away at the last minute. Defiantly adult, it rhymed words that can’t be printed in a family paper, which makes it strange that cinema’s biggest child has adapted it into a movie.
Mr. Burton, like Woody Allen, has been working from the same toolbox for his entire career but, unlike Mr. Allen, he has no pretensions to complexity. Mr. Burton’s movies are all surface — recollect one of them and you’re remembering how it looked. His characters are as stylized and shallow as cartoons and his plots are so blunt that they almost feel like a joke. Viewers suspect there must be more to them and so they imagine a third dimension when the filmmaker is only offering them two. He’s not so much a director as a visual obsessive.
But colliding his obsessions with Mr. Sondheim’s talent in “Sweeney Todd” causes a frisson that creates weapons-grade strangeness. Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics are the star of the show and Mr. Burton and his cast serve them with a vengeance. The story is as basic as it comes, a simple Greek tragedy with its humor stemming from everyone’s ignorance of the danger that surrounds them. “I can guarantee the closest shave you’ll ever know,” Mr. Depp growls to a potential customer, and the audience laughs because while the customer thinks he’s going to get a nice shave, we all know he’s going to get his throat slit. The only twist in the musical is that fate has set a trap for Sweeney Todd, too, and it snaps shut in the final scene with a satisfying symmetry.
The three leads — Mr. Depp, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and Alan Rickman as evil Judge Turpin — look like the kind of people who don’t wash their underwear regularly and they give the entire enterprise a delicious, unsavory air. Even a romantic ballad between the young lovers comes off less as Romeo and Juliet and more like John Hinckley Jr. and Jodie Foster. The only sour note is the shockingly shoddy digital effects.
Fortunately, the physical effects more than make up the difference. This is not a movie for the weak-stomached. Skulls crack like hardboiled eggs, spilling their kibbles across flagstone floors; faces are grilled and scorched; jugulars are slashed, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s (as Pirelli, a rival barber) manhood struggles to escape his tight trousers in extreme close-up. Prissy critics who hated “Hostel” will be seduced by the uptown pedigree of “Sweeney Todd,” but don’t be fooled: This gore is hard-core.
It’s a rollicking good ride and an excellent Christmas prank, but there’s no depth at the movie’s core, nothing that makes you stop and think. It’s pure holiday fun with about as much on its mind as Tim Allen’s “The Santa Clause,” only it’s executed with far more flair and artistry. “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a true holiday film, turning us green around the gills as it bathes our expectant, upturned faces in red arterial spray. God bless us, every one.