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PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/19/07)

Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical, a great favorite of latter-day Broadway mavens, was an as-ever ingenious melding of Brecht/Weill, Tin Pan Alley, and Grand Guignol, a rollicking, nasty piece whose subject matter — a homicidal maniac whose victims are turned into meat pies for the delectation of unsuspecting 19th century Londoners — was considered pretty daring, not to say completely inappropriate, for a musical of the time. Of course, since then theatergoers have seen, and applauded, the likes of, say, Urinetown, so Todd's novelty value no longer obtains — at least not on stage. On the movie screen, however, the novelty kind of does. This is absolutely the goriest musical ever conceived, and as the movie adaptation is the creation of macabre mastermind Tim Burton, that conception is more than honored.

But Sweeney Todd's blood doesn't begin to flow until a good hour into the film, after its peculiar tone of gloom and anticness has been well established. Gaunt and graying, Johnny Depp's gaunt, grim Todd, returning to London after a stint in Australia's penal colony for a crime he not only didn't commit, but likely never occurred, looks out from the prow of the ship headed for the city and contemplates the only thing that's been on his mind for 15 years: revenge — revenge on the genuinely creepy judge (Alan Rickman) who set him up in order to steal his wife. The Judge himself has not improved his character in the intervening years; he now holds Sweeney's daughter a captive in his luxuriously appointed home and intends to marry her. As Sweeney returns to his old barbershop, now sitting atop a vending place for the "worst pies in London," Sweeney's young shipboard friend Anthony (Bower) happens upon Judge Turpin's house, to be enchanted by Johanna (Wisener), a bird in a gilded cage he spies looking out a window.

As Anthony ducks the Judge's wrath, Todd forges an alliance with the pie maker Mrs. Lovett (Bonham Carter), his former landlord, now a widow and quite besotted with Todd. At first the plan seems easy enough; lure both the Judge's grotesque beadle (Spall) and then the Judge himself into Sweeney's barber chair, dispatch them, and be done with it. But a roadblock in the form of a rival tonsorial practitioner (Baron Cohen) and other complications force an escalation of the scheme, and soon Sweeney's slashing throats like there's no tomorrow, Mrs. Lovett's pies have suddenly grown more savory, and dementia rules the day.

This is all very familiar territory for Burton, who's been trying to imbue his work with more putative "depth" in recent years, with mixed results. Here, he harks back to Sleepy Hollow (one of his more underrated works) and conjures an atmosphere almost entirely drained of color, except for when its characters are recalling an idyllic past (as Todd does, early on) or imagining a cheerful future (as Mrs. Lovett does, in one of the film's most far-flung and successful set pieces, "By the Sea"). And, of course, when the blood flows.

Now imagine all this… with singing.

Sondheim's score is one of his most, well, Sondheimesque, with elaborately conceived melodic lines that can, and do, veer off into the lyrical as often and as unpredictably as they barrel into the dissonant. Depp and Bonham Carter don't have the kind of pipes this near-operetta might be said to require, and they both sing in a more pop- or rock-inflected, relaxed delivery; given the way the two characters are bound to each other and apart from everyone else, this approach makes sense, as all around them, down to the little fellow Toby (Sanders) who becomes Lovett and Todd's assistant, ring the tunes in plummier tones.

The result is one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years. The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease, and the performers — Depp the most protean of them — have a grand time with it all. Sweeney Todd is an apt cinematic paradox, a beautiful nightmare.

— Glenn Kenny