Johnny Depp sings for his gruesome supper in Tim Burton's latest Gothic masterpiece.
For a director who never writes his own scripts, Tim Burton is a remarkably consistent artist. Aside from the disaster that was Planet of the Apes (2001), he has never made a film that did not feel deeply personal, and his sumptuous adaptation of Steven Sondheim's famous musical about 19th-century barber Sweeney Todd, who made his customers into meat pies, is no exception.
In the version of the story concocted by Sondheim and collaborator Hugh Wheeler - adapted here by screenwriter John Logan - Sweeney (Johnny Depp) is really Benjamin Barker, a barber transported to Australia for 15 years for a crime he did not commit. On his return to London, he learns from his former landlady, Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), that his wife has been driven to suicide by the villainous Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman).
Taking up quarters once more above Mrs Lovett's pie shop, Sweeney plots his revenge and returns to his old trade. When his former assistant (Sacha Baron Cohen) tries to blackmail him and meets a grisly fate, it is the practical yet unconventional Mrs Lovett who proposes a means of disposing of the corpse that will, so to speak, kill two birds with one stone.
Sondheim's ingeniously rhymed, blackly witty lyrics suggest that Sweeney and Mrs Lovett have simply taken the universal principle of "man devouring man" to its logical conclusion. But Burton has never been especially interested in social commentary - or even in society, as anything more than a foil for his solitary anti-heroes. He and Depp are more concerned with the personal plight of Sweeney, a dead-eyed loon whose skill with the razor also makes him a gifted artist.
This version of the story puts a new, particularly bleak slant on many of Burton's cherished themes - the victim turned killer, the loner who becomes head of a surrogate family - while offering all the pleasures of traditional blood-and-thunder melodrama. Burton revels in the giddy, excessive horror of the material, but never treats Sweeney's disillusionment with humanity merely as a joke. Likewise, Bonham Carter is both fetching and genuinely chilling as Mrs Lovett, who is perfectly willing to condone Sweeney's murders provided they are done for "respectable" reasons.
With many songs from the stage version of the show truncated or omitted, this may not be a movie to satisfy purist Sondheim fans. Depp in particular will never be mistaken for a singer, but he dives into the part with such relish that his spiteful murmur becomes an acceptable convention after the first 20 minutes or so. Dramatically speaking, the mostly English supporting cast could hardly be bettered. Rickman is surprisingly restrained as Turpin, a psychopath as helplessly egotistical as an infant, and Timothy Spall at his hammiest is a natural to play the abjectly servile Beadle Bamford, whose very name suggests his kinship with Mr Bumble from Oliver Twist.
As much as he loves the jowly or cadaverous faces of English character actors, Burton loves to doodle in the margins of whatever tale he tells: in an inspired dream sequence, Mrs Lovett imagines running away to the seaside with Sweeney, who walks beside her along the pier like a zombie in a tailored suit. It's a cartoonist's conception - the images look like collages made by cutting up old postcards and pasting them together.
Given the geysers of blood that flow when Sweeney gets to work, it is remarkable how far Burton's visual approach depends on literal understatement - draining most of the colour from the image, placing the actors against blank or drab backgrounds and keeping them at a slightly greater distance than expected.
There is a kind of affinity between the deceptive simplicity of this style and the trickiness of Sondheim's score: the melodies seem easy to grasp for a few bars at a time, then slide out of reach. Certain musical phrases lodge in the head since they recur so often in different contexts - Sweeney's autobiographical recitative (beginning "There was a barber and his wife . . .") or the opening of Nothing's Going to Harm You, a soothing lullaby that turns unforgettably sinister when reprised.
But the song that haunts me most is the deliberately banal Pirelli's Miracle Elixir, an advertising jingle sung by Toby (Ed Sanders) to promote a hair tonic marketed by Sweeney's rival. In the second half of the film, Toby is hired by Sweeney and Mrs Lovett, and uses the same tune to shill their meat pies. The metre remains so regular that one might suspect a submerged pun on "organ grinder".
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