Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Back in high school I was actually apart of a production of Sweeney Todd. It was a play that had a short revival in the late 2000s and because of my involvement with the show and the increased interest among my friends, I saw this film back then. Before I looked deeper into the show, I honestly was not a fan of it. 

But then I saw the stage version, and I got more engrossed in the music and I was able to analyze the kind of music Stephen Sondheim composed for this dark comedy. So now I come back to the film when it gets put on Netflix and I want to give a review. 

The movie takes place in 1846 and a former barber named Benjamin Barker (played by Johnny

Depp) from London is returning after escaping a prison sentence for a crime that he did not commit. He returns to London looking for his wife and daughter, only to figure out they were taken advantage of by a corrupt judge (played by Alan Rickman) and his henchman (played by Timothy Spall). He figures out his wife has died and his daughter is now the coveted ward of Judge Turpine. Barker takes up the alias of Sweeney Todd and swears his revenge on those who ruined his life.

He teams up with the owner of a pie shop in London by the name of Mrs. Lovett (played by Helena Bohnam Carter) who happens to live under the loft Todd used to live back in the day. the two of them team up to create a credible reputation for Sweeney to lure the Judge and his henchman Beadle Bailey to be murdered with his shaving blades. 

Oh and then there's these two blocks of wood with pretty hair that are also in the show. 

Adapting a musical, like adapting anything that didn't start off as a movie is a difficult thing to do just because different mediums play differently. You can tell different stories in a comic book than you can in a movie and its supplemented by the medium. The same goes for musicals. 

What's more, Stephen Sondheim had a gift for utilizing the stage in ways that make it very difficult for those plays to be adapted into movies. I reviewed Into the Woods and then I went back and realized that there was a lot of the play cut because for example, there was no way they could have a narrator in the movie and feed him to the giant without breaking the tone of a fairy tale that they had already set up. 

A similar situation happened with Sweeney Todd. If you're familiar with the stage play, you'd know

that the musical begins and is injected with interludes that is actually some of the musicals best known songs. I love the opening song of the musical basically telling me to "Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd". I just thought it was a good way to start the musical and I was bummed upon my second watch to realize that that song is not in the movie. There is a orchestrate interlude during the opening credits but its not the cast singing it.

But beyond cutting the opening number, I thought the adaptation of the musical into a movie form was actually done pretty well. I thought they kept the correct songs and cut the ones that weren't as sexy or important to the musical. Now I think it shapes the story in a way that really diminishes certain characters, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just leaves certain characters with little to no story and just there because they were in the original play. 

So overall, while it may not seem like I enjoyed the adaptation of the musical, I actually thought it was done pretty well. 

But the adaptation is one thing, the approach is a totally different thing and the best way to describe it

is pure 2000's and beyond Tim Burton. And what do I mean by that?

Tim Burton is a director I've both really enjoyed and really can't stand. On one hand he does something like Big Fish or Batman, which utilizes great visuals and infuses them with a great story as well. And yeah sometimes that relied heavily on the Hot Topic looking visuals with his movies like Edward Scissorhands, and Beetlejuice (and Nightmare Before Christmas but remember, he didn't direct that), but those movies still had creative stories and creative characters that worked organically with the style Tim Burton could produce.

After Big Fish, Burton started to take on projects that were a little bit more mainstream and were more him bringing his style onto existing properties. But what's more, that style which had started as an alternative style is now a very familiar and almost mainstream style we've come to expect from Tim Burton. 

So how does this apply to Sweeney Todd? 

If you look at the original stage play, Sweeney Todd was a dark play but it didn't feel like the world

was in black and white. The movie is so devoid of color, with the exception of certain scenes, and this makes it is basically a Hot Topic wet dream for how dark and how steam punk it is.

On top of that, the movie decided to cast a star studded cast, most of them credited from Harry Potter. So don't try and tell me this movie wasn't trying to bank on a certain market of angsty emo teenagers who also loved Harry Potter.

And then there is the casting. Like I said, a lot of the cast is your dark emo carry overs from Harry Potter like Alan Rickman, Helena Bohnam Carter, and Timothy Spall. On top of that there's Johnny Depp who of course we more than popular with his involvement in Pirates of the Carribean. The problem came when you look at their individual characters and I think with the exception of Timothy Spall and... maybe Depp (?) the casting in this movie is just wrong. 

Let's start with Depp. 

Now the character of Sweeney Todd is pretty ambigious to the point that pretty much anybody could

play him. If you look at the Broadway versions, the character has been played by older men, younger men, white men, black men. There's nothing incredibly distinct about the character of Sweeney Todd that requires a certain look. The only requirements are that the actor must be able to portray that loss of his family, the ability to be a little bit unhinged, and he needs to be able to sing those feelings.

Depp does all three... sort of.

On one hand he is able to show the loss and how that loss has fueled his desire for vengeance and how he's slightly gone mad. On top of that, the lyrics are able to portray that loss and I will say Depp is able to shape those lyrics in a way that I do feel for his loss. The issues come when Depp goes into screensaver mode. He has moments where he just holds the same face and sure its a gloomy face like he's dealing with some shit, but with how muted and whispery this entire movie is, it looks more like Depp is a screensaver and when he's required to act he suddenly jumps on only to shut down again when he's not being engaged. Furthermore, there's a reason Depp had such a small role in Into the Woods and that's because, while he's not Russel Crowe bad, he's just not that great of a singer. You can tell he is not totally comfortable with the range and he just looks pained singing. Other interpretations of Sweeney Todd have given him a grandiose baritone voice and Depp just doesn't have that range and it feels like he's whispering his lines more than actually singing them.

And that's an issue with the entire film. Stephen Sondheim's music is not really something to be whispered. A lot of it is really obnoxious and plays with notes. Its really hard to grasp a lot of that music when everyone in this movie doesn't want to sing louder and definitely do not want to ham it up at all. 

And speaking of which, let's talk about Helena Bohnam Carter. 

I get it, Carter and Burton were married for a time. You're going to try and give your wife as much of

an opportunity to get work that you can. The issue is that Helena Bohnam Carter was not a horrible actress before she started to become the poster girl for Hot Topic and she married Tim Burton. Since then, she's been typecasted as the quirky and honestly kind of annoying woman who will play any role like that. And when it works for her I guess I can't fault her for finding her niche. But I really don't understand how you go from the great Angela Lansbury in the stage production to Helena Bohnam Carter. Lansbury was flamboyant and loud, Carter is reserved and whispers everything. Lansbury was jovial and very much the comic relief in this very dark play. Carter is dower and is honestly just Bellatrix Lestrange if she was the owner of a pie shop where they baked people into the pies.

And yeah, I know, I've been comparing the stage version to this movie a lot and that's not exactly a fair comparison due to my original point about how different mediums play. But somehow the play was able to put off this very dark tone but still manage to have your funny moments and your dark humor. I just think that the tone of this movie is all wrong. There is little to no humor in the film and its just a downer. I almost feel like they were trying to make it a horror movie and that's really hard to do with a musical, especially a Stephen Sondheim musical. 

I think the world of Alan Rickman but Judge Turpine is supposed to be this creepy old man who

intends on marrying his much younger ward in Johanna. I don't think Rickman turned off his Snape acting and instead it really just came down to Snape being an evil judge and wanting to marry his younger ward. Furthermore, Rickman is not the strongest singer either. Now I don't know if that's really the most important thing when it comes to the character but the main issue I have with Rickman, Carter, and even Spall in this movie is that they didn't really seem to turn off their Harry Potter persona and what we get is just Sweeney Todd: Harry Potter edition. Like there is actually a scene with Timothy Spall where he extends his cane to hit someone and with the shape of the cane and the way he looks in the film, I thought he was going to cast Avada Kadavra. Though I can't help but compare Spall to my "amazing performance" from highschool. ;) I mean look at this side by side and you tell me who wore it better?

And again, you have these two blocks of wood that are supposed to be playing Anthony and Johanna. In case you're wondering that Jayne Wisener playing Johanna and Jaime Campbell Bower playing

Anthony. Never heard of them? Yeah you probably won't hear about them every again. Now if I was jumping on the bang wagon of comparing it to the stage production, I would complain about how all their songs were cut and they didn't have any kind of character to develop. But the truth is, this is how the musical was adapted and how it worked well. The movie instead focuses directly on Sweeney Todd instead of a half assed love story between block of wood number one and block of wood number 2. While these two are "important" aspects of the story, everything that happens to them can be summarized down to a scene or two and at the end of the day, the story is focused on Sweeney Todd and his quest for revenge.

The other two performances worth mentioning are Sacha Baron Cohen who plays Pirelli and the boy who works for him and eventually works for Todd and Mrs. Lovett, Toby (played by Ed Sanders). You'd expect Cohen to give an over the top performance and breath some life into this dark and

gloom fest. But instead we get a really bored Cohen who I'm convinced was phoning this one in. The only person I felt was actually a really competent singer who actually mattered to the play was the kid who played Toby. He could actually belt out his music and I never felt like he was whisper singing. I felt like he was really the only one who gave a crap and didn't look like he was on screensaver gloom mode until he was interacted with.

As far as music goes, I am lucky enough to know the intricacies of Sondheim's music and that it is a hot mess. This is not just a criticism of the movie but of the musical itself. I do think there are a couple of good songs from this musical and I will say that the music is very creative. The way that I see it is that Stephen Sondheim is like the Quentin Tarantino of musicals. He's going to do whatever the hell he wants and he's going to play by his own rules. There is nothing you can do to stop him from doing these crazy ass melodies that are a pain in the ass to sing. I thought that while the music was mainly whisper sung, I thought the actors were at least able to clearly put across the melody and it made me go back and really admire the uniqueness of his music.

Does that mean its a good musical? In my opinion, I don't love it. I don't think there are enough songs in the musical that are memorable enough and nothing I have a whole lot of fun with. Like a lot of musicals, the first act blows the second act out of the water. The one good part is that while most musicals have one or two songs in the second act that make the musical feel like its going on one or two songs too long, at a certain point they just stop singing and its more focused on the horror bloody soaked ending. 

Speaking of blood and gore, this movie is not for the squeamish. 

Is this movie as bad as I remember it being? No I don't think so. It holds a structure and it holds true

to the musical while adapting it to the needs of the film. I don't love the casting because I don't think any of it was right and was more the casting of the popular names of the day. I wasn't a fan of the story to begin with but I thought the movie does a decent enough job telling that story. Now of course this is all just my opinion. If you have nothing else to do and don't care that the original music is now turned into Emo Johnny Depp: The Demon Barber of Diagon Alley, it might be worth checking out on Netflix. But I personally think there are better movies out there. Movies I hope to reviewing this month.

But those are my thoughts on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Have you seen the Stage production? Which do you think works better? Do you think Johnny Depp should ever sing again? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for movies I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog. 

I'll leave you with this. I mentioned there was an opening prologue to the musical that was left out of the film version. Take a look and let me know if something like this could have worked in the film adaptation or were they right to take it out? Enjoy!