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

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

For a filmmaker that sucks as much as Tim Burton sucks, he's sure got a lot of stupendous films under his belt. For every ill-conceived Planet of the Apes remake, there's a Beetlejuice or a Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. For every manic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory misfire, there's the beautifully rendered Corpse Bride or the madcap WTFness of Mars Attacks!. And even Batman, which in no way can be classified as a "success", recognizes the inherent awesome of Michael Keaton and has Jack Nicholson destroying Gotham to the music of Prince. I mean... c'mon. That's just crazy.

And yet for some reason, I've never been able to shake the feeling that Tim Burton just blows. Maybe it's the impenetrable sheen of his macabre production design, a problem that a lot of people seem to have with Wes Anderson (substituting "precious" for "macabre"). Or maybe it's that "Tim Burton" feels more like a brand than an artist, used to sell films like Monkeybone and The Nightmare Before Christmas (garnering the lion's share of the recognition for the latter). "It's Tim Burton, so you know that it's going to be spooky and gross... but in a fun way!" It's a little off-putting.

Or maybe I just hated Sleepy Hollow too much. That's a film that's entirely production design, and fails on just about every other level. "Hollow", indeed. (Zing!)

Which is all a complicated way of saying that I'm not Tim Burton Super-Fan #1. But Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is great. From Johnny Depp's first hateful line spewed forth in "No Place Like London" to the film's perfect final beat, Sweeney Todd is an efficient masterpiece. Burton, whose vice grip on every aspect of the production is often unmistakable on-screen, gives an inordinate amount of control over to the music, where Sondheim twists and leaps his way around the tale of a barber, wrongly imprisoned, back for revenge against those who did him ill. And the result is a film that doesn't feel like it's trying too hard, maybe because of the blending of authorial voices.

And, amazingly, none of it comes at the cost of Burton's recognizable visual tics. He still gets to revel in his love of Victorian bodices and crazy hair.

Helena Bonham Carter acts the shit out of Mrs. Lovett, who owns a pie-shop and takes the newly returned Sweeney under her wing. Alan Rickman is rapetacular as the judge who had Sweeney imprisoned, and Ed Sanders is goddamn adorable as Lovett's spunky young ward. That kid is goin' places.

I like musicals, although I often have a hard time seeing past robotic technicality of Broadway-trained singers. Here, Depp, Carter, and Rickman all sing with voices that are their own; while I'm not naive enough to think that it didn't take a lot of studio manipulation to get them there, their voices don't sound perfect. Depp's is fragile, Carter's is manic and untamed, and Rickman... well he actually sounds kind of great. But these aren't singers, they are actors. They wouldn't be able to perform this on Broadway, but who cares?

It's not perfect; some scenes are inexplicably shot against green screen, and it's distracting. In fact, there's a lot of CGI, and it's not used subtly to buttress the story, but rather calls attention to itself. Jamie Campbell Bower, as the young man who enlists Sweeney's help to win his love, is difficult to watch, if only because he feels like the actor who would be playing that part on stage. But despite these complaints, I'm going to have to reevaluate my "Tim Burton sucks" thing that I have. I know that's what he was waiting for.

Wes Anderson should totally adapt Into The Woods.

A Little Priest

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter