We all deserve to die - even you, Mrs Lovett, even I!
Now THAT's how you make a film musical!
I went to see an advance showing of Sweeney Todd last night and it's awesome. I mean, it's a Tim Burton-directed adaptation of a classic Victorian gothic tale starring Johnny Depp as serial killer who picks his victims from the streets of a beautifully realised late 18th-century London, before turning them into meat pies. And it's a musical. What could be finer?
Instead of presenting Todd as a man who does terrible things simply because he enjoys them, Stephen Sondheim's play (on which this is based) gives him a convincing motivation. The film opens with the mysterious Todd returing to London after fifteen years in the colonies. This exile is the result of the machinations of the villainous Judge Turpin, who wants Todd out of the way so that he can have his wicked way with Lucy, the barber's beautiful wife. Fifteen years later, Lucy has committed suicide and Todd's daughter is now in the judge's custody.
The opening scenes of Todd's arrival are beautifully filmed - its jaw-droppingly effective panoramas of a dark, foggy London as viewed from a ship on the Thames recall the electrifying atmosphere at the start of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This dark, dank view of London as a scary, hellish place, somehow empty and drained of colour sets the scene for the whole film. London becomes an amoral horror-world of jabbering demoniacal urchins and corrupt overlords that recalls the best aspects of Charles Dickens's later work. Exactly the scene in which to set a tale of a vengeful barber whose faith in humanity is so shattered that he decides to murder his way through the population of London, to 'practice on less hounarable throats' until he can bring his cut-throat razor to bear on the judge's neck.
Depp's performance is wonderful. The horror at the heart of his role is less to do with his serial-killing antics (which, though uncompromisingly gory, are treated with a finely judged sense of dark humour) but stems from his genuinely unsettling presentation of Todd's obsessive vengeful streak - despite his homicidal nature, you genuinely sympathise with him at the beginning of the film, just as you genuinely fear the empty shell of morality that he has become at its end. What stays with you isn't the endless stream of throat-slashing murders, but the impulses that drive the murderer - these are scary not least because Depp's prtrayal, at once sympathetic and terrifying, invites us to empathise with that which repulses us. Given the right circumstances, any one of us could be led to equally terrible deeds. And that's a truly frightening thought.
Above all though, it is as a musical that this film will live or die and in this sense it is also an unqualified success. The songs aren't allowed to break up the narrative in the way they often do in musicals. Indeed, the songs, the characters, the setting and the action seem to blend into a beautiful organic whole. The film flows along seamlessly until, after about twenty minutes or so, you just forget that the cast are singing and are gripped by the story. This is fortunate, because Helennah Bonham Carter really can't sing at all - and yet, you really don't notice. It's all about the acting. 'A Little Priest' is hilarious in a brilliantly nasty way and when she plaintively duets with Depp during 'My Friends' (where Todd sings an ode to his razor blades, the only 'friends' he has left) you really feel her longing when she sings 'I'm your friend too Mr. Todd', even though she can barely carry the tune. Timothy Spall is a similarly terrible singer who holds his own through his performance. Depp, Alan Rickman and Sasha Baron Cohen, on the other hand, all have surprisingly good voices. Indeed, the lack of strong, operatic vocals works in the film's favour, since it never takes you out of the real world by signposting the fact that the actors are singing. Instead, you bypass this often unpallatable fact and go straight to the raw emotion that the songs intend to communicate - unusually for a musical, there is no chorus and not a dancer in sight.
This is easily Tim Burton's best film (with the possible exception of Ed Wood) and, as always, his success lies in his ability to inject a strong vein of black humour into proceedings without ever compromising the validity of the piece by turning it into parody. I seriously can't wait to see it again.
I went to see an advance showing of Sweeney Todd last night and it's awesome. I mean, it's a Tim Burton-directed adaptation of a classic Victorian gothic tale starring Johnny Depp as serial killer who picks his victims from the streets of a beautifully realised late 18th-century London, before turning them into meat pies. And it's a musical. What could be finer?
Instead of presenting Todd as a man who does terrible things simply because he enjoys them, Stephen Sondheim's play (on which this is based) gives him a convincing motivation. The film opens with the mysterious Todd returing to London after fifteen years in the colonies. This exile is the result of the machinations of the villainous Judge Turpin, who wants Todd out of the way so that he can have his wicked way with Lucy, the barber's beautiful wife. Fifteen years later, Lucy has committed suicide and Todd's daughter is now in the judge's custody.
The opening scenes of Todd's arrival are beautifully filmed - its jaw-droppingly effective panoramas of a dark, foggy London as viewed from a ship on the Thames recall the electrifying atmosphere at the start of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This dark, dank view of London as a scary, hellish place, somehow empty and drained of colour sets the scene for the whole film. London becomes an amoral horror-world of jabbering demoniacal urchins and corrupt overlords that recalls the best aspects of Charles Dickens's later work. Exactly the scene in which to set a tale of a vengeful barber whose faith in humanity is so shattered that he decides to murder his way through the population of London, to 'practice on less hounarable throats' until he can bring his cut-throat razor to bear on the judge's neck.
Depp's performance is wonderful. The horror at the heart of his role is less to do with his serial-killing antics (which, though uncompromisingly gory, are treated with a finely judged sense of dark humour) but stems from his genuinely unsettling presentation of Todd's obsessive vengeful streak - despite his homicidal nature, you genuinely sympathise with him at the beginning of the film, just as you genuinely fear the empty shell of morality that he has become at its end. What stays with you isn't the endless stream of throat-slashing murders, but the impulses that drive the murderer - these are scary not least because Depp's prtrayal, at once sympathetic and terrifying, invites us to empathise with that which repulses us. Given the right circumstances, any one of us could be led to equally terrible deeds. And that's a truly frightening thought.
Above all though, it is as a musical that this film will live or die and in this sense it is also an unqualified success. The songs aren't allowed to break up the narrative in the way they often do in musicals. Indeed, the songs, the characters, the setting and the action seem to blend into a beautiful organic whole. The film flows along seamlessly until, after about twenty minutes or so, you just forget that the cast are singing and are gripped by the story. This is fortunate, because Helennah Bonham Carter really can't sing at all - and yet, you really don't notice. It's all about the acting. 'A Little Priest' is hilarious in a brilliantly nasty way and when she plaintively duets with Depp during 'My Friends' (where Todd sings an ode to his razor blades, the only 'friends' he has left) you really feel her longing when she sings 'I'm your friend too Mr. Todd', even though she can barely carry the tune. Timothy Spall is a similarly terrible singer who holds his own through his performance. Depp, Alan Rickman and Sasha Baron Cohen, on the other hand, all have surprisingly good voices. Indeed, the lack of strong, operatic vocals works in the film's favour, since it never takes you out of the real world by signposting the fact that the actors are singing. Instead, you bypass this often unpallatable fact and go straight to the raw emotion that the songs intend to communicate - unusually for a musical, there is no chorus and not a dancer in sight.
This is easily Tim Burton's best film (with the possible exception of Ed Wood) and, as always, his success lies in his ability to inject a strong vein of black humour into proceedings without ever compromising the validity of the piece by turning it into parody. I seriously can't wait to see it again.