by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
Sweeney Todd is about passion, obsession and vengeance. What more could one girl want? The movie is even bloodier and more violent than most stage productions. Blood is everywhere. They even tint the lower edges of the film with a red. I couldn't have picked a more apt director than Tim Burton, who, along with Depp's acting, added just the right touch of macabre humor and pathos.
The Tale of Sweeney Todd has been around since a least the mid-19th century. Some texts have claimed that he was based on a real barber who had an unsavory arrangement with a meat pie shop, but the historical records don't precisely back up this claim, though there was a similar (though unproven) case in medieval France. More than likely he was introduced in a penny-dreadful, morphed into an old urban legend that later scholars claimed as fact rather than fiction.
It became a play as early as 1847, but it wasn't until the 1970s that Sweeney Todd was given a motive other than greed. In 1979 the play was adapted as the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with music by Stephen Sondheim. It's this version, which is almost an opera in English, that you'll see adapted for the screen.
There are some changes and cuts of course; every adaptation from one medium to the other tends to suffer changes. On the whole, those changes were positive. We got to see Sweeney Todd in his old life as Benjamin Barker, in world of color and hope, not a world so gray that the only hope of vibrancy is blood, red blood to spatter the floor and sometimes the lens of the camera.
Fifteen years prior, barber Benjamin Barker had a lovely wife, daughter and life. But the evil Judge Turpin lusts Barker's beautiful wife, so he arranges for Barker to be transported on false charges. Barker comes back to London under the pseudonym of Sweeney Todd to find his wife and child. Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the proprietor of a meat pie shop, tells him that his wife has taken poison after being raped by the Judge and that his daughter is now the ward of the evil man.
Sweeney Todd is now consumed by vengeance, and when he can't get to the Judge, he turns his rage onto others. With the help of Mrs. Lovett, he goes on a bit of a killing spree. Set to music.
Judge Turpin and his lackey Beadle Bamford are played by two of the more notable villains in the Harry Potter series-Turpin is played by Alan Rickman (Snape in the Potter series) and Beadle Bamford is played by Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew aka Scabbers). It's a tad difficult NOT to think of Harry Potter, mostly because they're together in this film, along with Helena Bonham Cater, who also appeared in the last Harry Potter installment as the demented Bellatrix Lestrange. All three actors did a great job of inhabiting these somewhat different characters, but I still half expected Hermione Granger to leap out, wand at the ready.
In a bit of a side plot that brightens up the bloody flick, is the story of Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), the young sailor who picks up Todd from the ocean, and the young ward of Judge Turpin, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), who is coincidentally Todd's long-lost daughter. (In yet another Harry Potter connection, there are rumors on the IMDB board that Bower is hoping to play the young Voldemort in an upcoming Harry Potter movie.)
Musicals have a way of expressing high emotion, quickly. Passions don't need to be explained so much if they're sung. And so it is in Sweeney Todd, though I could have done without the extra-dramatic, extra loud musical flourishes at the end of the songs.
Different versions of the musical have played on different aspects of the relationship between Todd and Mrs. Lovett. This version shows a very interesting take on the matter - Depp playing his part with a disinterested depression; Carter playing her part with a deep and abiding fantasy of what their life could be. It's actually pretty funny.
The tale of Sweeney Todd will absorb you and take you into their mad, dark world. Gruesome doesn't begin to describe it, and many of the images will stay with you after you leave the theatre. Go, but don't take your kids. It's a dark, bloody comedy with a tragic end.
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