Film Review: Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd
This is an unlikely musical, based on the Victorian story of a murderous barber, whose neighbour bakes his victims into pies. When I heard Tim Burton was going to direct a film version of my favourite musical, my feelings were rather ambivalent: I like some of his films, but would his distinctive style overwhelm the original ideas? Then I found out Todd would be played by Johnny Depp. Can he sing? Will he be as annoying as when he played Captain Jack Sparrow? And Helena Bonham-Carter is playing Mrs. Lovett? Unlike Burton himself, I'm not particularly enamoured of her.
Well, expecting the worst, I was pleasantly surprised by the film. Only one sequence (a fast-forward zoom around the streets of London near the beginning) struck me as too Burton-esque. Depp is doing a similar accent to Jack Sparrow, but his performance is toned-down and sinister. His voice is not as strong as Len Cariou on the Broadway recording, but it's tuneful and effective. Bonham-Carter as Lovett is, in my opinion, nothing special and gives rather too low-key a performance - not a patch on Angela Lansbury's original, which got the mix of light and dark just right.
The supporting players are brilliant. Sascha Baron Cohen is perfectly cast as the extravagant barber Pirelli; Ed Sanders is a convincing Tobias (Pirelli's, and later Todd's, boy assistant); Jamie Campbell Bower gives a significantly different and more youthful performance as Antony, the sailor who falls in love with Todd's Daughter; finally, Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman are as good a Beadle and Judge (Todd's enemies) as could be hoped for.
A lot of the music from the stage version is missing, including all chorus music (which I did miss a little) but it all works amazingly well. My only reservation is that the blood and violence are probably overdone, and the scenes would have been more chilling if they had shown less (most notably the oven-scene). However, this film, despite my fears, did in no way disappoint.