Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – out now
They say revenge is a dish best served cold – whoever ‘they’ are, they clearly never told Sweeney Todd, who serves up revenge in the form of a humble meat pie; literally. Yet another winning result of the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp configuration, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical version of the old Victorian penny dreadful about a killer hairdresser who slices up his victims whilst they sit in his chair.
The story concerns one Benjamin Barker, a successful barber who falls afoul of the corrupt Judge Turpin who takes a shine to Barker’s pretty wife Lucy, and so trumps up some charges and has Benjamin kangaroo courted over to a certain overseas penal colony. Fifteen years later, the mysterious ‘Sweeney Todd’ arrives in London, having escaped from prison. He coincidentally moves into the flat once rented by a certain Benjamin Barker, and whilst there just so happens to come across a collection of polished silver razors… and begins plotting revenge.
Shacking up with a Mrs. Lovett, who runs a failing meat pie business based in the same building as the old barber shop where Todd now resides, the two strike upon a bargain to help reverse the fortunes of Mrs. Lovett’s 19th Century version of Greggs, and allow Todd to get his bloody revenge.
On the cultural landscape of Hollywood cinema, Sweeney Todd is charted somewhere between From Hell (set in Victorian London), Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter) and Edward Scissorhands (stabby slitty stab stab) with the trademark Burtonian gothic gloom and flair well and truly present. And yet, whilst it very much looks like a Burton film, the feel of this Todd is closer in spirit to the musical. Having said that, the songs have been abridged to fit into the timespan of 2 hour film, and as such the movie moves along nicely, with all the pacing of a maniacal waltz around a bloodstained ballroom.
The songs add a bleakly comic, almost camp edge to the gruesome proceedings – there’s plenty of singing and dancing against a backdrop of throat slitting, and bodies being packed into pastry foodstuffs, which gives the whole thing a deliciously queasy, tongue in cheek feel.
Unlike Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s not just Depp who steals the show; Borat star Sacha Baren Cohen puts in a stunning turn as Italian grifter Pirelli, and the ever excellent Alan Rickman steps into the robes of Judge Turpin, with fellow Hogwarts alumnus Timothy Spall playing his bumbling assistant Beadle Bamford. Helena Bonham Carter invests a vulnerability into the role of Mrs. Lovett; an earthy beauty with sad, pathetic eyes, which betray a life sustained by a fantasy that she’ll one day be together with the object of her desire, whatever the cost. All of the characters are emotional caricatures for sure, but every performance is on par with the others, giving the film a lurid, pulp feel which is unrelenting in its dramatic overdrive as it in its violence and ghoulishness.
