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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: December 30, 2007

Any fair review of the new Sweeney Todd film must risk passing judgment on a beloved commodity that has stood the test of time. People say a film like Spider-Man 3 is “critic-proof,” and from a financial standpoint, they’re quite right. But something like Sweeney Todd is impervious not only at the box office, but in the collective consciousness as well. If this legendary musical has been brought to the screen with any competence at all, who is Theo Michelfeld to say it is, in fact, unendurably un-entertaining? I would seem obliged to join the lemming chorus that declares this sort of thing the very salvation of cinematic entertainment. It’s either that or stand aside as the lonesome head-scratching dissenting madman who “doesn’t get it.” But folks, I can only say what I mean. And so it seems I shall wrap up 2007 by tilting at windmills—if I may be so bold as to reference a musical theater icon who sang actual songs.

Sweeney Todd is, of course, the story of a pair of serial killers. One, a barber, cuts throats, out of sheer misanthropy. The other, a baker, grinds the bodies into meat pies and serves them to the public. Never mind that the pathology of the serial killer lost its cinematic spiciness long around 1981. This film is directed by the overbearingly whimsical Tim Burton, and his approach, combined with and quadrupled by the overbearingly whimsical Stephen Sondheim score, gives the proceedings a spectacular irony that, in case no one noticed, had already thoroughly pervaded pop culture by the mid-nineties, and has thoroughly exhausted itself by this, the twilight of 2007. Indeed, irony itself, once a priceless literary tool, has practically been reduced, by our culture, to this one remaining repeating theme. Random, blasé murder? Been there, done that.

The acting in this film is uniformly excellent. Notable, of course, is Johnny Depp in the starring role. He sings beautifully, all the while whittled down to the sinew by hate. Bravo, Mr. Depp, as usual. Alan Rickman, as the barber’s nemesis Judge Turpin, is superb as well. And Sacha Baron Cohen, given about five minutes of screen time, steals the film. I might have gladly followed his character around for two hours, in spite of all the wandering melodies and kookily-angled leitmotifs. But he got killed and cannibalized. Anyway, Cohen actually achieves the genius this film scales incessantly after.

Acting and plotline and thematic material aside, this movie musical, like any other, stands or falls with the score. As we all know, different people are affected differently by any given piece of music. And so, if you find this kind of bombastic operatic aimlessness to your liking, far be it from me to post words on the internet that might change your mind. Indeed, some of you may have enjoyed Martin Scorcese’s The Departed all the more if only Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg had been forced to shoe-horn all their dialogue into someone else’s contention that they’d written a melody. It may well be my own intellectual or spiritual deficiency that causes me to find only one of Sweeney Todd’s melodies pleasing, and only one set of its lyrics clever. Perhaps the rhyming of “elixir” with “…do the trick, sir” is, in fact, the essence of wit—perhaps it’s the one missing ingredient in The Coen Brothers’ otherwise perfect thriller No Country for Old Men. Perhaps all of these Sondheimian virtues escape me, and I can only hope to grasp their brilliance the next time around, when I am reborn anew in a household that saturates my toddling spirit even further with the Broadway tradition. But from what my dubiously-enlightened ears could detect, there was nothing in this film as tuneful as the sixth-or-seventh most memorable song from West Side Story, or from Camelot, or from Oliver!, or from Grease, or from Guys and Dolls, et cetera. I was also aware, during the Sweeney Todd experience, that I was dearly missing the groovy bass guitar lines that warmed up the infinitely superior film Hairspray earlier this year (and I say that with apologies to tuba players everywhere.) In any case, wherever subjective opining ends and objective opining begins, let me at least suggest with all due seriousness that a film whose entire content was written in the seventies should be disqualified as a creative feat of the present year.

I had a similar objection to Chicago. No, that film never did manage to bump and grind me onto its pseudo-sexy bandwagon. And by the way, five years later, does anyone actually savor that movie? (Don’t answer please; I’ll yield the assumption that someone out there is wearing out their Chicago DVD as I write this.) Meanwhile, no matter how much praise we lavish on Sweeney Todd and its cinematic brethren, the genre of the movie musical will not actually be resuscitated until a creative person actually invests their talent in writing something new. Even then, I will contend, perhaps foolishly, that this kind of entertainment, with music and song actually supplying the lilt and sweep and crescendo of the narrative, is designed for the stage anyway, where audiences are required to fabricate all kinds of realities—buildings and populaces and such—with their imaginations. On film, this kind of approach continues to come across as nostalgic and misguided and literally misplaced, a willful devolving of the craft of storytelling. It’s true of Sweeney Todd, and true even of good musicals. Because, why are they singing, folks? Why the hell would they be singing?

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld