Crabbie likes him some Johnny Depp. Johnny as a swishy pirate. Johnny as a shy, brooding small-town boy with a fucked-up family. Johnny as a sick pedophile writer. Johnny as a member of a special police unit that goes undercover as high school students.
Johnny as a vengeful barber with a swoosh of Sontag-like white hair whose blood-lust gets so out of control that he fills up his landlady's basement with corpses she then uses to make meat pies?
As long as there are Sondheim songs...sure, why the fuck not?
I don't care what anyone says...Johnny is still delicious in this movie. Okay, so his complexion makes most corpses look tanned and healthy. So he has a wardrobe that would make even Count Dracula's attire appear cheerful. So that swoosh of Sontag-hair is annoying as all hell. Doesn't matter. Johnny is still Johnny. Even when he's singing, a rotting, snaggletoothed sneer on his face, about what a shit-hole London is. Even when he's brutally murdering Sacha Baron Cohen and stuffing him in a trunk.
There's a lot of brutal murdering in this movie. The director, Tim Burton, has tried to set a world record for throat-slashings, and I think he's succeeded (this after his Sleepy Hollow set the record for beheadings). Of course this is all very aesthetic and gorgeous, the somber, black-and-whitish photography and then these sudden gleeful crimson gushes and spouts. It has that typical Tim Burton quality of being innocently fetishistic. Burton always flirts with the perverse, but puts such a playful spin on it that you're never very bothered. Burton has a good time with his sick fantasies, which separates him from all the typical hack-and-slash afficionadoes out there. Burton brings an effortless whimsy to his morbid visions; his dark shit is always as eccentrically comic as it is creepy. The best joke in Sweeney Todd is visual: Sweeney's landlady/would-be girlfriend Mrs. Lovett fantasizes about moving to the sea-side with him. Burton shows these two pallid, cadaverous misfits sitting on a beach in the sunshine, and the juxtaposition is hilarious.
The movie is basically one big sick joke, but it's carried off with such style and spirit that it never gets old. The performers have a lot to do with this. No one - I mean no one - is better at bringing a subtle pathos to disturbed characters than Johnny Depp. Johnny understands how to make the touching and the scary stand side-by-side in his performances. When he sings to his razors - he calls them his friends; you get the feeling they're his only true friends in the world - it's both horrifying and weirdly moving.
And Johnny's got some great supporting performers by his side too. Helena Bonham Carter plays Mrs. Lovett with this fantastic chattering oddball energy that just wins you over. It takes skill to wring ironically comic life from a character who robs corpses, and chops up dead bodies to make meat pies all while secretly pining for a bourgeois life with a man who slits throats then dumps his victims through a trap-door in his attic room. And then there's Sacha Baron Cohen. He does another one of these total-immersion comic characterizations like Borat or Ali G, an Italian barber/magic elixir salesman called Signor Adolfo Pirelli, whom Sweeney bests in a shaving contest. Cohen has the greasy, insanely broad Italian caricature thing down. Then, he shows up again and reveals Pirelli is actually a charlatan; he begins speaking in his real English accent, and for the first time we feel like we're seeing the actual Cohen on-screen - a con-man without his mask. And then of course Sweeney dispatches him. He has to. Cause in this movie, pretty much everybody dies.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the songs. They're Sondheim, so of course they're great. The delivery is mostly strong: Depp can sing well enough to put Todd's snarling numbers across, and Carter has sufficient pluck to overcome her vocal limitations (girl can't sing a lick). Cohen has real vocal chops though his Pirelli accent makes some of the lyrics hard to understand during his big comic ditty about shaving the Pope. The cast is partly filled out with professional singers, the gorgeous Jamie Campbell Bower as Todd's friend Anthony Hope and pretty bird-like Jayne Wisener as Johanna, Todd's long-lost daughter. Bower and Wisener are no great shakes as actors, but it doesn't matter as their main job is to sing incredibly romantic love-songs, and provide a little counterpoint to the sooty, grim 19th-Century-Fleet-Street-as-Hell atmopshere. Burton has put all this together beautifully. It's the best musical since forever.
Sweeney Todd gets 4 Chips Ahoy out of 4. It's rated R for fountains of blood, cannibalism, wartiness, lack of skin pigmentation and nasty songs about eating people.
