“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is rated R for graphic bloody violence.
Tempo grade: B+
Review by Rick Romancito, The Taos News
Chiaroscuro is generally a visual art term used to describe the use of light and dark to convey an emotional quality or mood. Aside from the film noir genre, popular movies today tend to be overly lit, the idea being that explicit rendering is what audiences require to understand the subtleties of an actor’s performance.
Tim Burton isn’t one of those directors, and yet his work rises above the fray despite heavily relying on chiaroscuro to both illuminate and obscure that which is essential to his storytelling. There is no better example of this artistry than his work on “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” his stunningly staged film interpretation of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony award-winning Broadway musical.
Burton’s characters swim amid Dickensian pools of light, darting from the deepest burnt sienna shadows and charcoal black depths while directing our gaze to marvel at the rich scenic details offered by set designer Francesca Lo Schiavo and director of photography Dariuz Wolski, who, incidentally, shot all three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. But it’s Johnny Depp who breathes life into this menacing tale of murder and vengeance.
Of course, the big question is whether Depp can sing. Actually, he can, and he’s not bad even though he sounds a bit like he’s channeling David Bowie. Depp plays a barber who started out as Benjamin Barker. In his youth, Benjamin was happy and hopeful, having married a beautiful woman (Laura Michelle Kelly) and becoming father to a lovely little girl. But all that changed when the wicked Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) took that away, leaving Benjamin broken, dispirited and ultimately changed.
So changed, he goes away and returns to London years later as Sweeney Todd, a skilled barber in need of a venue. He finds it above a meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who is one of the few Londoners familiar with Benjamin’s former life and who winds up becoming an accomplice and vague paramour of Sweeney Todd’s. The reason for all this is cloaked in revenge. But before he can set to work, he must establish his reputation and does so by besting the flamboyant barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) and stealing away his young assistant, an orphan boy named Toby (Ed Sanders).
As Sweeney begins plotting for ways to get Judge Turpin into his chair he learns that the judge has a young ward living in his home, a pretty young girl named Johanna (Jayne Wisener), who just may be Sweeney’s long lost daughter and who is the object of desire for a boy named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower).
But before Sweeney’s machinations approach fruition, he has certain tensions that must be released, tensions that result in blood, buckets of it. To keep from being found out, Mrs. Lovett comes up with an ingenious and terrible scheme in which the bodies falling from Sweeney’s upstairs chair become ingredients for her meat pies.
She is an overnight success.
What I haven’t mentioned here is the element of symbolism which lies heavily as a subtext to the music and artful staging. At this, Burton is a master. Few directors are willing to approach the understated and unsaid, preferring the brilliance of an overly lit stage and overwrought theatrics, but here Burton presents ideas that are at once uncomfortable and shocking, and yet vividly attractive. We certainly don’t want to see so much blood in a movie musical and yet we cannot look away.
It’s the light and the dark of our own minds that Burton has found a way to expose. Hats off to an Oscar-worthy effort.
This review was published in the Feb. 7, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. Visit www.taosnews.com.
0 Responses to “Cutting edge”