2 posts tagged “sweeney todd”

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.

To refer to Giulietta Masina's work in La Strada as a "performance" seems inadequate. After all, do we praise Charlie Chaplin's acting ability in City Lights? Is Gene Kelly a master thespian because of Singin' In The Rain? How about the 18-inch model of King Kong, is it a Meisner devotee or does it subscribe to Stanislavski's system?

In La Strada (The Road), Masina is Gelsomina, bought for 10,000 Lira by the brutal Zampanó (Anthony Quinn) and conscripted as his assistant in a touring sideshow. Gelsomina is just a child (though not literally; Masina was 33 when the film was made, and Fellini’s wife), and Zampanó fails to recognize the flashes of innocence and inspiration that she brings to his “act”. Instead, he criticizes her and takes her for granted, crushing the naïve spirit that could have been his salvation. Richard Basehart is “The Fool”, the obnoxious and self-destructive jester who competes with Zampanó for Gelsomina’s attention, only to find himself on the business end of the brute’s lethal fist.

Masina is complete joy. It’s not a silent performance, but it sure feels like one. Like the clown she’s enlisted to be, she uses a minimum of face to a maximum effect. In fact, I took to naming the different faces she used throughout. There’s “pouty-bones”, “pleased as punch”, and “bawling-because-Anthony-Quinn-is-crushing-my-soul”. Whether it is Masina herself or Fellini’s slightly restrained direction as it relates to her, Gelsomina is magnificent.

Anthony Quinn, for his part, humanizes the monstrous Zampanó effectively. It’s a good thing, too, because, as it turns out, that’s the whole point.

Fellini, not yet obsessed with his own fetishes, has made a real live film here. Sure, it’s easy to recognize him through the Nino Rota score, the fixation on stage and spectacle, the beastly women, but I much prefer his particular brand of crazy when it’s projected onto the outside world and not directed solely within.

I also love this film because, unlike later works, it perfectly integrates Fellini’s love of the theatrical into its narrative. Sure, there are the indulgent cinematic flourishes, but he’s still operating within a lot of the neorealist framework, and has yet to move completely out of that movement and into his own head. He stops the narrative so that we can watch a high-wire act, and it’s thrilling and fun to watch, and then we move right along with Gelsomina’s story. Starting with La Dolce Vita and descending precipitously after 8½, Fellini’s work becomes all setpiece, all without context.

I saw this in the same week that I saw Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and I think that the juxtaposition was illuminating. Here are two films by men often caught in the trap of their own affectations or neuroses. Burton is often damned with the faint praise of being a "visual" director, which means that his films are technical exercises without soul. Fellini would go on to direct films that seemed to take place solely within his self-obsessed, sexually charged ego. 8½ is more than two hours of the greatest masturbation ever caught on film. But with La Strada and Sweeney Todd, both men are able to make effective films by letting someone else do most of the emotional heavy lifting (in the case of La Strada, it’s Masina and Quinn, and for Todd, it’s Sondheim’s music). Fellini was never considered an actor’s director, but here, the performances are so affecting and beautiful that he does well to stand back, to not get in the way, and to watch his wife do great work.