![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Review: Sweeny Todd
Sweeny Todd is one of the great urban legends of England. Like Jack the Ripper, everyone knows the story of the barber who slit the throats of his customers and disposed of the bodies by providing meat for his landlady's pie shop. The tale been told and re-told over and again; in the earliest versions his motive is theft but it was the recasting of the story as a revenge tragedy that really caught at the public imagination. That's the version which became the West End musical and which now, is one hell of a movie.
There is no director with a better understanding of the grotesque than Tim Burton. Grotesque is not easy to do on film; too many attempts end up as un-scary horror or weird fantasy instead. But Burton gets it. In adapting Sondheim's musical for the big screen, he has butchered the soundtrack, and purists who adore the stage version will probably find the film lacking. But any adaption of book, play or tv show to a movie format requires some changes, some editing, some of it brutal. Better by far to forget the original and take this movie on its own merits...because it's a masterpiece.
Johnny Depp is deliciously dark in the leading role. He comes into view like an icy wind, a bitter and twisted man returning home from a penal colony. At first, he seems a tragic figure, and we get flashbacks to his past to underline that he used to be a normal, happy guy. But as the full tragedy unfolds, it becomes clear that he's less tragic, more...well, just crazy. He sings a love song to his razors, finally holding one shining blade up to the sky like some dark excalibur drawn from the stone and declaring himself complete again with the blade in hand. And yet even in that moment, there's a sense that it could have been different. It's a wonderfully rich performance from Johnny which gives the final scenes of the story a sense of genuine tragedy, not merely dramatic justice or inevitability.
Helena Bonham Carter as the evil Mrs Lovett was perfect casting. She's a beautiful woman who knows how to wear those old costumes, and isn't afraid to be made ugly. Visually, her performance is wonderful. Right from her first appearance you can see that she's missing a few marbles and just doesn't care. Her infatuation with Sweeny is seriously creepy; all the more so because he never even notices her in any sexual way. The first time she really gets his attention is when she proposes cannibalism as a method of getting rid of his first victim's body.
Alan Rickman as the villainous Judge Turpin...well, it's Alan Rickman. He's a subtle villain. We hate him from the beginning, and there's a certain dark glee in anticipating his bloody end because he really does deserve it if anyone does. I think it's easier to hate him simply because his villainy is more real, more of the modern world. A judge without compassion who abused his position , sending an innocent man to prison so he could seduce his wife. Rape, implied pedophillia and just plain brutality...it's all very familiar evil, contrasted with the over-the-top acts of Sweeny Todd and Mrs Lovett.
But all of this I expected. What I didn't expect from this film was the comedy. It's dark comedy, to be sure, but it's truly funny: the kind of comedy where you laugh out loud and then feel a little weirded out that you can laugh at something like that. Those moments make the film a keeper, for me.
The cinematography is really great. Tim Burton always makes fantastic use of colour and this is no exception. Sweeny's London is virtually monochrome, the flashbacks warm and bright with saturated colours. When the action takes us from a flashback of Sweeny's former happy home to the present hovel it has become, the contrast is sharp enough to underscore the subjectivity of the flashbacks: he's remembering a perfect world that never truly existed.
The only thing I found to dislike in the film was the opening credits sequence: a thick red liquid that looks more like spilled paint than the blood it's supposed to be oozes and drips across the screen as the credits roll and the opening music plays. The sequence has that shiny quality of CGI and made me worry that the rest of the film would be like that (it's not). But once that's over and the film itself begins I found nothing to complain about.
In the UK, this film got an 18 cert. Does it deserve it? Well, this is most definitely not a movie to show your children and it's not for the squeamish. It's about a guy who cuts throats with a razor, for goodness' sake, what do you expect? The murder scenes are very bloody but the blood, often the only real colour in the monochrome scenes, never seems real. It's like technicolour blood: too red and in the bloodiest scenes there's something wrong with the consistency of it - the liquid doesn't flow quite like real blood would. That element of comedy, too, takes the edge off the horror of most of it, though the film does not pull any of its punches. And the stage-tragedy of it, with the improbably high body-count on stage at the end also helps remind us we're watching a story, not anything real. There are, however, two moments at the climax - the deaths of Mrs Lovett and Sweeny Todd himself, which are, I suspect, the reason the Brit censors upped the cert. from the 15 most of the film deserves to the 18 it has. And yeah, for those two moments, each quite horrifying in different ways, the movie earned its adult rating.
And I've gone through this whole review without mentioning the music. Well, I'm no expert when it comes to music, I just know what works for me. And I came out of the cinema after watching this and straight away went looking for the soundtrack...which was out of stock in every store I tried. I think that says it all.
Fantastic film.
There is no director with a better understanding of the grotesque than Tim Burton. Grotesque is not easy to do on film; too many attempts end up as un-scary horror or weird fantasy instead. But Burton gets it. In adapting Sondheim's musical for the big screen, he has butchered the soundtrack, and purists who adore the stage version will probably find the film lacking. But any adaption of book, play or tv show to a movie format requires some changes, some editing, some of it brutal. Better by far to forget the original and take this movie on its own merits...because it's a masterpiece.
Johnny Depp is deliciously dark in the leading role. He comes into view like an icy wind, a bitter and twisted man returning home from a penal colony. At first, he seems a tragic figure, and we get flashbacks to his past to underline that he used to be a normal, happy guy. But as the full tragedy unfolds, it becomes clear that he's less tragic, more...well, just crazy. He sings a love song to his razors, finally holding one shining blade up to the sky like some dark excalibur drawn from the stone and declaring himself complete again with the blade in hand. And yet even in that moment, there's a sense that it could have been different. It's a wonderfully rich performance from Johnny which gives the final scenes of the story a sense of genuine tragedy, not merely dramatic justice or inevitability.
Helena Bonham Carter as the evil Mrs Lovett was perfect casting. She's a beautiful woman who knows how to wear those old costumes, and isn't afraid to be made ugly. Visually, her performance is wonderful. Right from her first appearance you can see that she's missing a few marbles and just doesn't care. Her infatuation with Sweeny is seriously creepy; all the more so because he never even notices her in any sexual way. The first time she really gets his attention is when she proposes cannibalism as a method of getting rid of his first victim's body.
Alan Rickman as the villainous Judge Turpin...well, it's Alan Rickman. He's a subtle villain. We hate him from the beginning, and there's a certain dark glee in anticipating his bloody end because he really does deserve it if anyone does. I think it's easier to hate him simply because his villainy is more real, more of the modern world. A judge without compassion who abused his position , sending an innocent man to prison so he could seduce his wife. Rape, implied pedophillia and just plain brutality...it's all very familiar evil, contrasted with the over-the-top acts of Sweeny Todd and Mrs Lovett.
But all of this I expected. What I didn't expect from this film was the comedy. It's dark comedy, to be sure, but it's truly funny: the kind of comedy where you laugh out loud and then feel a little weirded out that you can laugh at something like that. Those moments make the film a keeper, for me.
The cinematography is really great. Tim Burton always makes fantastic use of colour and this is no exception. Sweeny's London is virtually monochrome, the flashbacks warm and bright with saturated colours. When the action takes us from a flashback of Sweeny's former happy home to the present hovel it has become, the contrast is sharp enough to underscore the subjectivity of the flashbacks: he's remembering a perfect world that never truly existed.
The only thing I found to dislike in the film was the opening credits sequence: a thick red liquid that looks more like spilled paint than the blood it's supposed to be oozes and drips across the screen as the credits roll and the opening music plays. The sequence has that shiny quality of CGI and made me worry that the rest of the film would be like that (it's not). But once that's over and the film itself begins I found nothing to complain about.
In the UK, this film got an 18 cert. Does it deserve it? Well, this is most definitely not a movie to show your children and it's not for the squeamish. It's about a guy who cuts throats with a razor, for goodness' sake, what do you expect? The murder scenes are very bloody but the blood, often the only real colour in the monochrome scenes, never seems real. It's like technicolour blood: too red and in the bloodiest scenes there's something wrong with the consistency of it - the liquid doesn't flow quite like real blood would. That element of comedy, too, takes the edge off the horror of most of it, though the film does not pull any of its punches. And the stage-tragedy of it, with the improbably high body-count on stage at the end also helps remind us we're watching a story, not anything real. There are, however, two moments at the climax - the deaths of Mrs Lovett and Sweeny Todd himself, which are, I suspect, the reason the Brit censors upped the cert. from the 15 most of the film deserves to the 18 it has. And yeah, for those two moments, each quite horrifying in different ways, the movie earned its adult rating.
And I've gone through this whole review without mentioning the music. Well, I'm no expert when it comes to music, I just know what works for me. And I came out of the cinema after watching this and straight away went looking for the soundtrack...which was out of stock in every store I tried. I think that says it all.
Fantastic film.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
The one piece of casting I'm not sure of was Timothy Spall as the Beadle, and that's only because he's the same guy who played Wormtail in the Harry Potter movies. So seeing him as Alan Rickman's sidekick was a little...weird. I kept thinking Snape/Wormtail instead of who they were meant to be.
no subject
I love this musical and I was so very happy when I found out that Johnny Depp would play Sweeney Todd in the movie! I knew he could sing from PotC, (the pirate song and so on) so as soon as I could, I bought the soundtrack from iTunes and just LOVE it!
I'll probably have to wait to see the movie on DVD, but I am SO looking forward to it!
Thanks for your detailed and interesting review! =>}
no subject
*grins* Well, I knew he could hold a tune, and I know he has a musical background, but there's a big difference between that and carrying Sondheim.
So sorry you've got to wait for the DVD. Mind you, it's on my must-buy list already.
no subject
I was pretty confidant that he could do Sondheim kinds of songs as soon as I heard he was in the movie. And BOY I love a pretty man, but when he can also sing? *melts* =>}
We COULD go to the movie here, but to get to a theatre that plays movies in the original English is at least a half hour drive away and frankly, I can never be bothered to fight traffic for that any more. *sigh*
Anyway, even if I saw it in the theatre, I KNOW I'd buy it as well. *g*