Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Rated R for blood, death, cannibalism, and rape.  A PG-13 rating might be the best thing for Tim Burton because it forces him to be creative with his macabre humor.  But giving him carte blanche feels exploitative.  The sheer amount of times we had to watch the corpses break their necks from the chute was to the point of being absurd.  Yeah, this is a hard R.

DIRECTOR:  Tim Burton

I'll tell you why I watched this. We watched Schmigadoon season two and I wanted to get all of the Sweeney Todd references.  Also, it aligned with my spooky season expectations, so that was pretty nice for me.  But, man, I forgot that I was the one guy on the planet who didn't worship at the altar of Tim Burton.  Honestly, I wanted to think that this movie was good.  But I'm apparently in the anti-camp for this film. I'm the guy who loves Les Miserables and not this, despite the fact that they kind of share a cast.

Why?  Why was I so bored?  There is this thing I have to admit.  Maybe my expectations were too high.  I mean, this is Stephen Sondheim.  This is the grand daddy of musical theatre.  I normally think that I would worship at the feet of Sondheim.  Then I Googled "Stephen Sondheim musicals" and found out that I only really like a select few of Sondheim's musicals.  This is a a me thing.  Please, I acknowledge and bow to his genius.  It's just that, Sweeney Todd, completely divorced from the film version of the play, didn't really do anything for me.  In fact, the Schmigadoon / Schmicago version of Sweeney Todd was way more compelling than the version that I saw here.  There's nothing really fun about this movie.  I think the macabre works in juxtaposition.  Tim Burton actually cut his teeth on the initial version of Sweeney Todd by having stuff like Edward Scissorhands and The Addams Family.  We laugh at stuff like Beetlejuice because the contrast between the dark and morose with vanilla society is what makes the concept entertaining.  Sweeney Todd is just over the top violence and sadness without actual character development.

Maybe that's what really bugs me.  The story starts in medias res.  Benjamin Barker, while not named Sweeney Todd, has adopted the mantle of the character.  He's already bitter and vengeful with the loss of his wife and child.  He comes into the story morose and looking for blood.  A lot of the story is just him sitting around a room, hyping himself up for the murder of Judge Turpin.  He's even given the opportunity to do so and squanders it.  It feels like a lot of the movie is a stall tactic.  The most interesting element of the story is the shift to cannibalism by Mrs. Lovett and that becomes the most fascinating combination.  I don't know why Barker would just be cool with cannibalism and his choices in murder is bewildering.  But this is where the movie starts for me.  And the thing is, a lot of this is squandered.  I know that this story is based on a Penny Dreadful.  I can't say that I've read the original.  I don't know the ins and outs.  But the fact that this guy goes from a revenge story to Sweeney Todd just murdering willy-nilly and feeding people to society makes the hero not a hero.

I'm not saying that you need to ahve a moral character as your protagonist.  I actually really like morally bankrupt characters as my protagonist.  But this is a story that is meant to be hinged in sympathy.  Benjamin Barker is only sympathetic in flashback.  We have no complexity in the decisions that are made throughout the story.  He's so go-with-the-flow, to the point where cannibalism isn't even a morally grey area for him, that there is nothing to weep for. He's just sad all the time.  Now, I like Johnny Depp in a lot of things and I don't really know the musical or past productions for this show, but he's just so flat affect in this.  He's talking about how life is just weaponized misery and trash, but that doesn't make him sympathetic.  I kind of just wish that there was this moral complication with the whole thing.  The thing is, there's this opportunity right there.  Toby and Mrs. Lovett have this weird connection in the story where she's put through the moral gauntlet.  She grows closer to Toby and that's interesting when she decides to lock him up in the meat room (there's a word for that exists; I just don't know what it is right now).  (What's her endgame, by the way?  He would just be in there forever?) 

But Toby is around Todd the entire time.  He is an opportunity for redemption and second chances.  The jump from actual father to found father is right there and how does this movie not make that decision? Toby is this kid who goes from being a street hustler to exhibiting genuine gratitude to these two monsters.  How does that not tug at the heartstrings and give the protagonists something to consider?  Think about this.  Imagine this was the movie.  Toby thanks Todd for taking him in.  Todd, in his bloodlust, is covered in gore.  Toby doesn't care.  He is just happy to have a father figure who doesn't take advantage of him.  Todd looks himself in the mirror and washes himself clean.  Toby is cleaning Todd's razors.  He swipes the air, mirroring Todd's precise cuts and Todd is horrified by what he has become.  It is in that moment he spies Judge Turpin. He has this opportunity to murder the man who destroyed his life.  He spares Turpin, which allows Turpin to discover Todd's true nature.  In doing so, he kills Toby and Todd is given this morally complex story.

But instead, we get his tragic tale of Todd murdering his wife.  There was this era in comics (and I'm definitely not on Estes Kefauver's side in this) where horror comics modeled themselves after Penny Dreadfuls.  There was this tragic ending that revolved around self-destruction.  Sweeney Todd is no exception to this.  He ends up killing his wife, who he does not recognize because she is homeless and mad.  It's effective, but it's also kind of fake.  We don't really get to know anything about her.  When it's revealed that she's Mrs. Barker, there is this reveal equivalent of "huh".  There's no resonance because we know so little about this character.  I know the movie has to be a rushed version of the story because we know that Mrs. Lovett knows about the beggar woman. She knew that Mrs. Barker wasn't dead, but Mrs. Lovett wishes for a future.  The movie has to do a lot of "tell, not show", leaving that emotional connection a little barren.  I never get the notion that Sweeney Todd is warming up to Mrs. Lovett in any way beyond symbiosis.  I want to like that twist, but it earnestly has no emotional resonance with me.

I can't help but thinking that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street would make a good double-feature with The Phantom of the Opera in the worst way possible.  There are these moments where characters make absolutely absurd choices and I have a hard time connecting with any of the characters.  If anything, these are movies that love filming the gothic and being incredibly melodramatic.  I know that people like this movie and don't like Phantom, which boggles my mind because they're the same movie to me.  I'm not saying you should like Phantom.  I thought that musical was pretty abysmal as well.  It's just that I don't get why this movie is so good.  Maybe we're not all that used to the blending of gore and musical.  I know that there are other movies out there, like Repo! The Genetic Opera that touch on stuff that Sweeney Todd touches on.  But this is indulgant Tim Burton at maybe his worst.  I don't like Tim Burton on a good day (for the most part.  I kind of like Batman Returns and Big Fish).  But this is distilled Tim Burton.  This is no one saying "no".  I wanted to like it, but it kind of is just empty show for me.