Post by princess2942 on Dec 22, 2007 15:48:08 GMT -5
Razor-sharp ‘Sweeney Todd’ is director Tim Burton’s crowning achievementSoren Andersen; The News Tribune Published: December 20th, 2007 10:20 AM
Like Nosferatu gliding into Bremen harbor aboard his plague ship, Sweeney Todd sails up the Thames to London bringing dread, seeking blood.
With his funereal pallor and angry, haunted gaze, Todd is deadly vengeance personified. Put a straight razor in each hand, and he’s retribution in red.
Once an unassuming barber, he’s been terribly wronged and will use the tools of his trade to do terrible things to those who have stolen his family and his freedom. With Johnny Depp wielding the steel and Tim Burton behind the camera orchestrating the slashings, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is the grandest kind of Grand Guignol and a triumph of big-scale Hollywood filmmaking.
Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s hit stage musical about serial homicide and gruesome baked goods is awash in lust and longing, innocence and depravity, horror and humor. Set in Victorian England, it’s voluptuously atmospheric, with gray skies heavy with portents, cobbled streets swarming with rats and gutters running with blood.
And it sings: songs of sorrow, malice and murder. This is a movie where the lead character hymns a love song not to a woman but to his razors. “My friends,” he calls them as he admiringly holds them aloft to the light. In that moment he proves beyond all doubt that he is, in the words of another character, “barking mad.”
Though not a trained singer, Depp handles the vocal demands of Sondheim’s songs – and much of the dialogue is sung – with grave authority. Helena Bonham Carter, playing Mrs. Lovett, his downstairs neighbor who bakes Todd’s victims into tasty meat pies, sings with similar conviction and straightforward power.
“Sweeney” is the movie Burton and Depp were born to make together. Their previous collaborations (there have been five) have all been warm-ups for this.
The creepiness inherent in every character Depp has played for Burton, from Edward Scissorhands to Willy Wonka, comes to its fullest flower with “Sweeney” and fits the material perfectly. Burton’s gothic sensibilities mesh seamlessly with Sondheim’s. Together with screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator”), director of photography Dariusz Wolski and production designer is Dante Ferretti, they turn a tale that started life as a 19th-century penny-dreadful thriller into something deep and dark and vastly strange.
Being packed off to an Australian penal colony for 15 years on trumped-up charges by a depraved judge (Alan Rickman, sneering and seedy) who desires Todd’s pretty young wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) cracks the husband’s spirit. And when he returns and discovers that his wife has poisoned herself after being raped by the judge and that the judge is now the guardian of Todd’s innocent daughter (Jayne Wisener), the barber goes completely around the bend.
Mrs. Lovett loves this brooding madman and fantasizes (in the movie’s only musical sequence where the sun shines) of living happily ever after with him. But his desire for vengeance blinds him to her feeling for him. And once she converts his first victim into pie filling, acting out of a combination of love and shrewd business sense (her secret ingredient makes her pie shop a must-stop destination for London gourmets) they’re both doomed.
Depp and Carter play their parts to the hilt yet with just enough well-considered restraint to keep their characters from becoming caricatures. With the exception of Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a rival barber, quickly dispatched, no one indulges in any mustache-twirling histrionics here.
Burton pays homage to horror classics like “Nosferatu,” evoked in his opening arrival-in-London scene, and “Bride of Frankenstein.” The dramatic white streak in Sweeney’s hair, a symbol of the frightful shock that has driven this once-good man insane, is a knowing nod to Elsa Lancaster’s signature hairstyle in that earlier picture.
Such salutes signal that Burton aspired to make a movie worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as those classics. With this gloriously gloomy and fearsomely heartfelt film, he has succeeded. “Sweeney” is his crowning achievement.
Soren Andersen: 253-597-8742, Ext. 6235 soren.andersen@thenewstribune.com
Like Nosferatu gliding into Bremen harbor aboard his plague ship, Sweeney Todd sails up the Thames to London bringing dread, seeking blood.
With his funereal pallor and angry, haunted gaze, Todd is deadly vengeance personified. Put a straight razor in each hand, and he’s retribution in red.
Once an unassuming barber, he’s been terribly wronged and will use the tools of his trade to do terrible things to those who have stolen his family and his freedom. With Johnny Depp wielding the steel and Tim Burton behind the camera orchestrating the slashings, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is the grandest kind of Grand Guignol and a triumph of big-scale Hollywood filmmaking.
Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s hit stage musical about serial homicide and gruesome baked goods is awash in lust and longing, innocence and depravity, horror and humor. Set in Victorian England, it’s voluptuously atmospheric, with gray skies heavy with portents, cobbled streets swarming with rats and gutters running with blood.
And it sings: songs of sorrow, malice and murder. This is a movie where the lead character hymns a love song not to a woman but to his razors. “My friends,” he calls them as he admiringly holds them aloft to the light. In that moment he proves beyond all doubt that he is, in the words of another character, “barking mad.”
Though not a trained singer, Depp handles the vocal demands of Sondheim’s songs – and much of the dialogue is sung – with grave authority. Helena Bonham Carter, playing Mrs. Lovett, his downstairs neighbor who bakes Todd’s victims into tasty meat pies, sings with similar conviction and straightforward power.
“Sweeney” is the movie Burton and Depp were born to make together. Their previous collaborations (there have been five) have all been warm-ups for this.
The creepiness inherent in every character Depp has played for Burton, from Edward Scissorhands to Willy Wonka, comes to its fullest flower with “Sweeney” and fits the material perfectly. Burton’s gothic sensibilities mesh seamlessly with Sondheim’s. Together with screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator”), director of photography Dariusz Wolski and production designer is Dante Ferretti, they turn a tale that started life as a 19th-century penny-dreadful thriller into something deep and dark and vastly strange.
Being packed off to an Australian penal colony for 15 years on trumped-up charges by a depraved judge (Alan Rickman, sneering and seedy) who desires Todd’s pretty young wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) cracks the husband’s spirit. And when he returns and discovers that his wife has poisoned herself after being raped by the judge and that the judge is now the guardian of Todd’s innocent daughter (Jayne Wisener), the barber goes completely around the bend.
Mrs. Lovett loves this brooding madman and fantasizes (in the movie’s only musical sequence where the sun shines) of living happily ever after with him. But his desire for vengeance blinds him to her feeling for him. And once she converts his first victim into pie filling, acting out of a combination of love and shrewd business sense (her secret ingredient makes her pie shop a must-stop destination for London gourmets) they’re both doomed.
Depp and Carter play their parts to the hilt yet with just enough well-considered restraint to keep their characters from becoming caricatures. With the exception of Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a rival barber, quickly dispatched, no one indulges in any mustache-twirling histrionics here.
Burton pays homage to horror classics like “Nosferatu,” evoked in his opening arrival-in-London scene, and “Bride of Frankenstein.” The dramatic white streak in Sweeney’s hair, a symbol of the frightful shock that has driven this once-good man insane, is a knowing nod to Elsa Lancaster’s signature hairstyle in that earlier picture.
Such salutes signal that Burton aspired to make a movie worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as those classics. With this gloriously gloomy and fearsomely heartfelt film, he has succeeded. “Sweeney” is his crowning achievement.
Soren Andersen: 253-597-8742, Ext. 6235 soren.andersen@thenewstribune.com