Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Blood
But No Heart
(Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 1/7/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Tim
Burton is nothing if not consistent. Most of his biggest successes (Ed
Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Batman) have come in a more-or-less consistent
mode of macabre pastiche, like an explosion in a Halloween kitsch factory.
Many have also featured Johnny Depp in the lead. The Burtonization of
the Stephen Sondheim slasher musical Sweeney Todd, with Depp
as the homicidal barber, therefore seems about as surprising as yet
another Nicolas Cage sell-out, or a gross-out gag from the Farrelly
brothers. Isn't every Tim Burton movie a version of Sweeney
Todd?
And so, as we enter Sondheim's world
of straight-razor killings and cannibalistic meatpies, we get the usual,
Burtonesque fright-wigged characters shambling in the coal-dust gloom
of everybody's cartoon image of Victorian London. Calling it "Dickensian"
would be an insult to Dickens, because the novelist at least looked
at such scenes with compassion; Burton, by contrast, seems to care more
about getting the blood to spurt prettily from the jugular.
Depp, as the deeply wronged barber
bent on revenge, and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, his flesh-mincing
accomplice, try hard to rise above the level of soulless sleepwalkers.
Depp appears to rely on the fact that the camera loves him; Bonham Carter
at least manages to be wryly humorous in spots. Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat)
has a cameo as Pirelli, a flamboyant rival barber with his own secret.
While Cohen is on the screen, it's possible to believe that something
delightful and surprising might happen. Otherwise, the characters might
as well be those animated puppets in Burton's Corpse Bride.
The fact that Todd is a musical
might given the film a pulse—if any of the actors were strong singers
(they aren't) and if the score had a single memorable tune (it doesn't).
Depp almost seems to be on to something when he spits forth Sondheim's
rant of despair—
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and it's filled with people who are filled with sh-t…
but such moments are too rare and too short. Watching
Sweeney Todd is like watching a corpse rot in real time—a
process with some fascination, but leaving us with little more than
dust and a bad odor.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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