It takes a great deal of energy to get up and go see a movie musical these days. They are usually too “big,” and demand too much from you. Worse, they aren’t “fun.” Since Andrew Lloyd Webber and his ilk destroyed the musical in the 1960s, the genre has tilted toward ambitious operatic subject matter, such as chess matches or the fall of Saigon. A musical is now supposed to cap a big evening, and leave you prostrate with its overwhelming emotions, but the tunes are sing-songy instead of songs and the music tends to be non-melodious seesawing. Weirdly, despite the fact that the movie screen is inherently an artificial medium, musicals seem even more strained and phony up there. The screen traps a musical in amber, like prehistoric bugs. Westside Story innovatively took the musical to the real streets, but the same director, a few years later took on The Sound of Music, and rendered it as static (see the staging of “Climb Every Mountain”) and discomforting as every other contemporaneous big idea musical, especially its near contemporary My Fair Lady.

My resistance to seeing Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, though, was based less on the fact of the film’s musicality (a fact nearly hidden by the film’s trailer) than that I am not all that enthusiastic about its director Tim Burton. He’s fine, I like him better than Lynch, but I never feel the need to dash out and see his every film (several of which I still haven’t caught up with, such as the twee sounding Big Fish). He seems trapped in the world and style of Goth, Emo, ‘Mo, or what have you, while trying to harness yet exploit his oddity in order to walk the delicate line of commercial viability. The consistent quality of his vision disguises the actual unevenness of his films, which can go from the poignant Ed Wood to the disastrous Mars Attacks to the simply dull Planet of the Apes.

Sweeney Todd gives him the chance to dwell on the Gothic again, as the Dickensian environs of mid-1800 London lend themselves more readily to pale faces with raccoon eye circles. Like Burton’s second Batman movie, the film begins with the cloaca, following blood and debris through the sewers, then switches to an arriving ship, which, like Dracula’s, brings death in the form of Todd, the former Benjamin Barker, returning to London after 15 years of penal servitude in Australia. His return is Dantes-esque, as he is back to exact revenge on the judge (Alan Rickman) who unjustly imprisoned him in order to get at Barker’s wife, who then presumably poisoned herself. In short order, Todd opens up a tonsorial parlor, and then conspires with the Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) downstairs to turn his victims into meat pies (it wasn’t exactly clear to me why he was killing so many people, when his goal was originally to kill the judge and rescue his daughter). Todd gets his revenge, but not without complications.

One thing that is an aide to the success of the film is that Burton’s movies are already rather musical, in that they are impressionistic, free associative, outlandish, operatic, and full of big emotions. Though there is no music in the accepted sense in the Todd world, the viewer nonetheless accepts an occasional outburst of song or unlikely duet. On the other hand, thanks to the numerous shots of geysering blood plopping into the camera lens, it’s hard to imagine the film becoming another holiday standby like Sound of Music, shown every year at Xmas. But that it is a superior musical is clear from the scene in which the secondary character Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who loves Todd’s imprisoned daughter from afar, sings a song to her from the street. Burton squeezes a lot of cinematic juice out of the sequence, which is really just about a guy walking down a street. But compare the sequence to the similar moment in My Fair Lady, in which director George Cukor has no idea what to do visually with the song “On the Street Where You Live.”

Sweeney Todd is a big musical, despite its chamber piece limitations of cast and setting. It took two companies — Warners and DreamWorks (which is Paramount these days, and thus a third company), plus the Zanuck company (a fourth) — to put on the once-hit musical. Some day all the companies will merge and once or twice a year there will just be the one big movie. In any case, all these companies have done their best to minimize the perception that Sweeney Todd is a musical, and the role of Stephen Sondheim, who co-wrote the original. Perhaps, ultimately, they were just nervous about making another movie that took a sympathetic view of a serial killer. It is at times difficult to see just how we are to take Todd, who has the potential to evoke the same sympathy as Norman Bates in Psycho. And after all, this is Burton’s specialty, outsiders who are often near-monsters on whom Burton insists that we shower interest and compassion.

Finally, the real reason to see the film is for the acting, which is all around excellent. Depp, who can apparently do anything, acquits himself well as a musical star (he used to be in a rock and roll band, but then didn’t everybody?). A De Niro-like muse to Burton’s Scorsese, Depp’s acting, especially in the final scene, is superb. The shot of Depp looking down at the floor and slowly realizing who is really lying there may just be one of the great moments of “realization” in all screen acting, supported by the newfound vigor and maturity of his face. Also good is Helena Bonham Carter, who begins by acting with her cleavage, but spends the rest of the film employing a convincing and fluid voice.

For the record, the film comes in several long cinematic acts. Act One ends at the 21-minute mark, when Todd gets his razors back; Act Two ends when he wins a barbering contest and makes a name for himself, around the 40-minute mark; Act Three ends when Todd finally meets up again with the judge, at the 60-minute mark, followed shortly by the forming of a partnership with Mrs. Lovett at the 71-minute post; and the last act begins with the celebration of the pie shop as a huge success. The rest, after that, is, at least as far as mortality goes, all downhill.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.