Reviews2.Main Content
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Mon, 4 Feb 2008
The camera darts through the twilight of Tim Burton’s Gothic London like a thing possessed. Dockside stands a pale and prematurely aged man, his tousled hair dark but for a streak of white. This is Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) - formerly Benjamin Barker, barber extraordinaire - and he’s back in London town with a vengeance after serving fifteen years for a crime he didn’t commit - a cruel fate dished out by the villainous Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) in a bid to make Todd’s beautiful wife Lucy and his young daughter Johanna his own.
Taking pity on Todd, Mrs Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who runs the grotty pie shop underneath Todd’s former attic flat on Fleet Street, persuades him to return upstairs to reopen his business. However, things soon go awry with the arrival of eccentric rival barber Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), a man who knows too much about Todd’s past, thus triggering a relentless killing spree whereby the revenge-fuelled Todd slits the throats of countless unsuspecting customers, working his way towards those who are directly to blame for his anguish. Mrs Lovett soon susses out Todd’s dirty deeds, but she knows a business opportunity when she sees one, and finds a convenient way of disposing of Todd’s victims - by mincing them into fillings for her new, improved pies. And sure enough, business booms at last.
This adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical, itself based on Christopher Bond’s version of the Victorian legend, has been a long time coming, having attracted interest from the likes of Alan Parker, Sam Mendes and others over the years. But Burton’s stamp is so clearly marked on this deliciously dark movie that it’s now hard to imagine anyone else at the helm of it.
Everything about this film seems perfectly pitched, from Johnny Depp’s singing (amazing for a man who’d never sung a note before) to production designer Dante Ferretti’s skewed vision of a Gothicized London – not to mention the music itself, which features more heavily than dialogue.
The whole ensemble cast deliver top notch performances, clearly relishing the prospect of getting under the skins of these bitter and twisted characters. A romantic fairytale subplot between a young sailor and the now nubile Johanna offsets the barbershop bloodfest nicely, allowing for the spectrum of human emotion to be explored. The trump card is the scene-stealing Sacha Baron Cohen, utterly hilarious as Pirelli, the grossly over-the-top conman who provides just about the only source of colour – bar blood – in this otherwise wrung-out, desaturated world.
Another piece of magic occurs in the first duet between Depp and the tuba-voiced Alan Rickman, in a scene where Todd considers killing the judge while shaving his beard. And a word about the ending – it’s magnificent.
This review has been written by Owain Gillard, a Script Factory Member whose ambition to write screenplays full-time is being bolstered by various assignments as a script reader/consultant and film reviewer. Having graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1998 (Film & TV Dept) with a First Class Honours Degree, Owen currently works for the Wales Screen Commission.
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