A second-tier Tim Burton movie is still pretty close to the A-game. Giving Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 horror stage musical a big-screen treatment, Burton lands his grimmest material yet.
The sheer fatalism in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street verges on shallowness, but Burton gives Sondheim’s tragedy a sly makeover, using an Expressionistic look and domestic comedy.
As Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) returns to London (“A great black pit, and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit”) he vows revenge on the man who ruined his life. He sets up his barbershop above a meat-pie diner owned by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter); the pair work out a partnership of butchery and cannibalism.
The joke of making the typical Burton outsiders an approachable lower-class, 19th-century, serial-killer couple gives Sweeney Todd memorable punch. But Burton doesn’t know how to relate to Todd’s tragedy with the empathy that characterizes his best films.
Sweeney Todd‘s main dissatisfaction is that it doesn’t find placement among Burton’s best artist-hero-driven explorations—of the line between reality and illusion (Sleepy Hollow), of teen rebellion (Mars Attacks!), of the subjectivity of greatness (Ed Wood), and of the desire and fear of the limelight (think the Joker and Batman<in Batman).
Burton needs to connect with his subjects. The coldness of Sweeney Todd has a melodramatic texture that deepens on a second viewing. It’s a very good movie, without necessarily being a very good Tim Burton movie
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2008.