At the Movies: Sweeney Todd

I'm the first to admit that I don't care for most musicals. I tend to find them inane, cloying, and pandering to simple emotional patterns for maximum effect. Good thing I wrote my college honors thesis on the American musical. There are, however, some musicals which I do like. There are musicals that I love. Then there are a few works of musical art were, for me, transformative. They changed the way I thought about music and performance. John Adam's Fearful Symmetries, Prince's Pop Life, and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd did that for me.

So you can imagine the mixture of hope and dread with which I received the news that a film version of the musical was being made. On the one hand, it's bringing the musical to the masses. On the other hand, they'd probably butcher it. The good news is that they didn't butcher it. In fact, they made the music sound better than it ever has.

A tale of revenge furiously told, this Sweeney Todd is a visual feast and the most mature piece of film making Tim Burton, the director, has ever made. About 1/3 of the musical score has been stripped out, but without any great loss given the intense focus of the film on revenge, revenge, revenge. There are moments of visual mastery in the film which open up the musical in a way the stage probably never could or would. I won't forget the end of "Epiphany" when the world shifts from horizontal to vertical perspective with Sweeney on his knees, literally and psychologically going over the edge in to madness.

But what about the singing? Well, it's not particularly great, but that doesn't really matter much when the actors are acting the hell out of each and every moment in the show. Johnny Depp has a passable voice, but one that's not rich enough for Sweeney, but he brings interesting rock flourishes to his singing that make the musical strikingly modern, while visually sealed in its fantastical (and fantastically realized) Victorian world. His performance is very, very good, pure and focused, but he doesn't quite make you feel the full force of the tragedy of the end of the piece. Helena Bonham Carter fares worst with the singing, with her very thin, dispassionate voice, but paradoxically gives a moving, full-bodied performance, particularly as the tale progresses and she comes to know more and more that she will always be fundamentally alone.

The two trained singers in the movie, the actors playing Antony and Johanna, are pretty uninteresting and their signing was less than impressive to me. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice, as to not make the untrained voices of the other principals not sound worse. If that's the case, it was a bad choice. Given their wooden acting and their only-passable singing, they left a hole in the overall production.

Much has been made of the extensive use of blood in the film, and, yes, there are geysers. I thought the violence was handled extremely well, though, as it contrasted the highly stylized slashing of the throats and subsequent cascades of blood with a realistic and gruesome end for Sweeney's victims as they crashed, head first, in to the floor of the pie shop below the barber's chair. Those images were startlingly realistic, and truly gruesome in the case of the Beadle, and managed to anchor the violence in reality while maintaining the style and vision of Burton's film.

I had a other few minor quibbles (excluding the crowd lines from both "Pirelli's Famous Elixir" and "God That's Good" was really odd and left those sections emptier than they should have been), but overall I thought the filmmakers did a excellent job with the piece. I don't think that it could have ended up in better hands. It may not be my favorite film of the year, but it's certainly one of the best.