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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by John Logan, based on the musical by Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim

Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman

Classification: 18A

***1/2

What's black and blue and red all over? The answer is Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a musical for the holidays with almost nothing in common with Dreamgirls or Chicago.

Burton has taken Stephen Sondheim's 1979 Broadway hit musical about the razor-wielding barber and made it his own, placing it in a miasmic Victorian London that resembles the animated world of The Corpse Bride. Set-designed to the last spider-web strand and dot of beard stubble, the film is a brooding study in sooty skies and drab rooms. The cadaverous characters have nests of hair, chalky skin and large eyes sunk in purple sockets.

Though he may be the most famous name in American theatre, composer Stephen Sondheim has said his “basic language is cinema.” Burton has opened up the stage production, with flashbacks accompanying some songs, and one brightly coloured fantasy sequence. Burton also evokes classic 1930s Hollywood horror films with a palette so muted it's almost black and white. When we first see Sweeney Todd, he's standing on the deck of a dark ship sailing up the Thames, next to a young sailor, Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower). Todd (Johnny Depp) is returning to London after escaping from an Australian prison. His white-streaked hair suggests the Bride of Frankenstein.

His gloomy return evokes Dracula, returning to haunt the living. Though he still looks more like a teenaged rock star than a middle-aged ex-con, Depp gives Sweeney Todd presence to spare. The important thing is he's a champion misanthrope, as we can guess by his lyrics to the opening song, No Place Like London: “There's a hole in the world/like a great black pit/and it's filled with people who are filled with shit.”

And Merry Christmas to you, too. As fans of Sondheim's musical know, Sweeney Todd has a burning motive for violence. Years before, when he was a young barber by the name of Benjamin Barker, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) lusted after Benjamin's young wife, Lucy. The judge had the barber arrested and shipped to Australia so he could have her. Returning to his old Fleet Street haunts, above his landlady Mrs. Lovett's revolting meat-pie shop, he learns that Lucy has taken her life and the Barkers' now teenage daughter, Johanna, is the judge's ward and potential sexual conquest.

Sweeney is fervent for revenge. The brooding misfit takes his beloved razor and raises it high: “At last my arm is complete again.” For the record, the musical Sweeney Todd (1979) predates Edward Scissorhands (1990).

Coincidentally, the young sailor Anthony spies Johanna (Jayne Wisener) in the judge's window and the two fall in love. The spiteful judge dumps the girl in a mental asylum. Like Sweeney Todd, Judge Turpin (Rickman, in his usual witheringly fine form) is another hater of humanity who sends innocent men to the gallows on the grounds that all men have done something for which they deserve to die. He's supported by his sidekick Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall), an unctuous henchman who carries out the judge's dirty work.

Sondheim's original musical was already a mad synthesis of Jacobean shock, Brechtian irony and Dickensian pathos – to which Burton's lush visuals add another layer of aesthetic distance. The overall effect is somewhere between melodrama and camp. At the camp extreme is the scene-stealing turn from Sacha Baron Cohen as Adolfo Pirelli, a rival barber and con man with an atrocious fake Italian accent and garish clothes. After Todd humiliates him in a public shaving duel, Pirelli attempts to blackmail him, thus making himself the first of Sweeney Todd's victims. After a while, the audience can almost get used to the eruptions of blood that explode like bouquets of roses from a magician's hat.

After her initial shock at finding Pirelli's corpse, the practical Mrs. Lovett welcomes the fresh source of filling for her pies, while adopting Pirelli's child assistant (Edward Sanders) as her unknowing accomplice in the meat-grinding business. The role of Mrs. Lovett, originated by Angela Lansbury on Broadway, is typically the musical's big, bawdy laugh-getter. But Helena Bonham Carter, who with her big eyes, pout and rag-doll hair looks like Depp's ethereal twisted sister, takes it in another direction. She's another obsessive, caught up in the madness of the man she loves. Neither she nor Depp are trained singers but they act the songs well, evoking the loneliness of the characters and the mordant humour of Sondheim's lyrics. Instead of gusto, Bonham Carter delivers a delicately witty rendition of Mrs. Lovett's big numbers: A Little Priest, a song comparing the taste of those in various professions, and By the Sea, where she imagines her and the demon barber in grisly domestic bliss.

If there's a fault to Burton's film, it's that it feels a little too self-contained and personal for such a meaty subject. Sondheim's Victorian pastiche, with its brooding maniac, young lovers and corrupted child, lays out a conventional melodrama in bold, ironic quotation marks. Though Burton's version is faithful, the filter of his sensibility has turned it into another of his necrophilic creepshows. Every other image feels as though it should be framed and mounted on a wall. Then, as if to remind us that this is a musical about flesh, Sweeney's razor slides across another throat and the screen explodes into celebratory streamers.