The many murders Johnny Depp commits in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are sure to inspire both shock and laughter. Shock from just how unexpectedly grisly they are, with thick geysers of Bava-red blood gushing from one throat after another — could this grim, blood-drenched revenge saga really be the kind of movie audiences want to see with the Christmas season fresh in their minds? And laughter from the realization that yes, — yes! — this is exactly the kind of movie for the holiday season: big, bloody and deliciously cynical, with a plot whose machinery grinds away with the frightening inevitability of one of those dark Victorian workhouses Sweeney Todd (Depp) can glimpse from the window of his barbershop.
That’s where he’s plotting his revenge against Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who 15 years earlier falsely sentenced him to life and transported him to Australia. Now Todd’s wife is dead, and his beautiful daughter Johanna lives as a virtual prisoner and prospective bride in Turpin’s home. Until Todd can figure out a way to lure Turpin to his place of business, he slakes his bloodlust by killing random customers — he strikes a bargain with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), his downstairs neighbour, who uses the corpses as a cheap but delicious ingredient in the meat pies she sells.
The plot teeters on the edge of camp, but director Tim Burton makes the surprising decision to play the story mostly straight. It takes awhile to warm up to Carter’s underplaying, but her take on Mrs. Lovett not as a comic gargoyle but as a grim, practical-minded, quietly cunning businesswoman is oddly admirable. The dazzlingly clever cannibalism puns in “A Little Priest” are still here, but in a shortened, much drier form. Indeed, the biggest comic set piece is now “By the Sea,” a bit of a throwaway number in the original stage version, which here becomes a blackly funny ditty in which Burton visualizes Mrs. Lovett’s lovesick fantasy of running a seaside hotel with Sweeney — whose gloomy, scowling presence spoils each tableau, like a cockroach stuck in the icing of a birthday cake.
That sequence aside, Depp is the film’s biggest shortcoming. Sweeney is a vocally demanding role. There’s no disguising the fact that Depp’s voice (and his phony British accent) aren’t up to the challenge of the show’s most powerful songs. In many of the musical numbers, you can feel Burton covering for and cutting around Depp’s vocal weaknesses (and, to a lesser extent, Carter’s), and a Sweeney who can’t thrill you musically is almost a contradiction in terms.
Still, fans of the show will be thrilled with this version of it. Screenwriter John Logan makes several cuts and alterations to the songs and story, but they are all unfailingly intelligent, tightening up the suspense, speeding up the plot and emphasizing the cruelty and cheapness of life in the Victorian age in ways much more subtly effective than the intrusive Brechtian staging Harold Prince created for the original.
Burton has been trying to get this project off the ground for two decades, but unlike so many Hollywood directors’ pet projects, this one doesn’t feel locked up in its creator’s head. It’s got a mad, slashing excitement that hopefully will get viewers past their squeamishness. As Sweeney himself cries out, “I’m alive at last, and I’m full of joy!”
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