film review

If you’re at all acquainted with Tim Burton’s filmography, you will have a good idea of what to expect from his movie of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd. Burton has never adapted a stage show before, and he has never previously made a film quite as blood-squirtingly gory as this one, but in tone and style it is consistent with his other pop-gothic works, such as Edward Scissorhands, the Hammer pastiche Sleepy Hollow and his cheerfully macabre animated films The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.



In that last movie, the main characters are a pallid man and woman voiced by Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Here they are again in the lead roles in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, appearing in their own bodies, but looking quite cartoonish in traditional Burton manner: deathly-pale skin and lots of eye shadow. Depp, modelling a mane of black hair with a single white streak, could pass for a middle-aged Edward Scissorhands. Blades are a big part of his act, because, of course, he’s playing the barber in Dickensian London who slits his customers’ throats to provide his downstairs neighbour, Mrs Lovett, with ingredients for her pies.



The first thing that strikes you about Depp’s performance is that his cockney accent shares a postcode with the speech patterns of Captain Jack Sparrow. The similarity was perhaps unavoidable, but the echo of that overexposed pirate is wearisome. It puts Depp under pressure to make his performance distinctive in other respects – and he fails to do so. His Todd smoulders and growls entertainingly, but in a lightweight sort of way and without any flashes of individuality.



The other actors do equally conventional work. Bonham Carter is dishevelled and sardonic as Mrs Lovett; Alan Rickman employs his usual supercilious purr as Judge Turpin, whose villainy fires Todd’s homicidal rage; Timothy Spall is in gargoyle mode as the judge’s henchman, Beadle Bamford; and Sacha Baron Cohen does a comedy Italian accent as Pirelli, Todd’s foppish rival in barbering, who wears trousers almost as immodest as Borat’s swimming trunks. You don’texpect microscopically nuanced acting in a musical, but if the film’s performances were never going to be subtle, they could at least have been surprising.



Some viewers may have a further complaint: none of the leading actors has a top-notch singing voice. Well, perhaps I’m biased, being a hopeless singer whose idol in movie musicals is Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, but I didn’t mind the vocal shortcomings. Songs in movies are never as compelling as they can be live, and when, as here, they aren’t accompanied by much movement from the actors, they have the potential to drain the life out of a film as surely as a cameo by Quentin Tarantino. The singing’s rough edges, such as Depp’s Bowie-esque gulps, suggest the characters’ brutish personalities coursing through the songs, and this helps to keep the musical sequences energised. That said, some of Sondheim’s pieces fail to make an impression. The ones with insistent rhythms and lots of wordplay – the scene-setting No Place Like London and Todd and Lovett’s menu of possible victims, A Little Priest – come through strongly, but the more melodic numbers emerge as standard Broadway huffing and puffing. This goes not only for the ditties of the bland young lovers (Jamie Campbell Bower and Jayne Wisener), but for the supposed show-stopper, My Friends, Todd’s love song to his razors.



What keeps the film alive in these dronesome passages is Burton’s eye. His way with dark, cluttered interiors and cityscapes, and the flair with which he whizzes his camera through these settings, are consistently enjoyable. Even in visual terms, though, the film has no resoundingly memorable scenes – except for its graphic moments of bloodletting, and these are oddly misjudged. Why did Burton have to earn an 18 certificate by including such explicit goriness in a film whose essential spirit is not all that savage? He focuses on melodrama and makes Todd another of his tormented outsiders, while playing down one of the meatier aspects of Sondheim’s original: cannibalism as a metaphor for the evils of economic ruthlessness. The film might have dwelt more on that side of things, giving greater depth to its characters’ cruelty and anger. As it is, it’s an engaging but rather flat spectacle. Instead of having quite so much blood, it could have done with a bit more bile.