Sweeney Todd
Directed by Tim Burton
On Christmas night 1940, the theater critic Brooks Atkinson attended the Broadway opening of an innovative musical about an amoral nightclub entertainer. The Rodgers and Hart show Pal Joey may have the greatest score of any Broadway musical, was distinguished by the starmaking performance of a little-known dancer from Pittsburgh named Gene Kelly, and overall remains a thrilling theatrical coup. But in his review, Atkinson could not get past its depiction of Joey’s libertinism, which included an affair with a much older married woman.
“Although Pal Joey is expertly done,” Atkinson wrote, “can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”
Fortunately for him, Atkinson was in retirement when Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street premiered on Broadway in 1979, since the challenge of having to write about it might have killed him. For if Atkinson found Pal Joey‘s portrait of adultery distasteful, how could he have tolerated a musical–an opera, really–in which a psychotic Victorian man and his gleefully mercenary mistress murder random Londoners and grind up their dead bodies to use as filling for wildly popular meat pastries?
How could Atkinson have stomached the sight of the chorus, at the beginning of Act Two, shouting “God, that’s good!” as they unknowingly gobbled down those cannibalistic treats? Right there on the stage of the Uris Theater, he would have had to take in the title character inviting unsuspecting men into his barber’s chair, slitting their throats, and then opening a chute underneath the chair and sliding the corpses down into a bakehouse furnace room below.
Atkinson’s concern about even portraying adulterous conduct onstage seems ridiculously quaint today. But to give him his due, he was merely echoing the sentiments of a good part of his New York Times readership in 1940. However, by 1979, when Sweeney Todd made its maiden appearance, there was not, nor could there have been, any similar talk. Audiences and critics alike had long before been carefully taught that to dismiss an ambitious work of art because its content might be offensive would open one up to charges of philistinism and Babbittry. Sweeney Todd is the most highly regarded musical of the past half-century. It has been revived twice in New York since its original production, and is now entering the classical repertory–the only Broadway musical to become accepted as a full-fledged opera aside from Porgy and Bess.
I, too, am a Sweeney Todd devotee. I think it is a magnificent thing that towers over every other piece of American theater in my lifetime. I have seen it five times and would happily see it a dozen more. If challenged, I might even be able to sing most of it, beginning to end, from memory. And I am lost in admiration for the new screen version, which is extraordinary: a brilliant truncation of Sondheim’s sweeping three-hour tragedy into a brisk and intimate two-hour musical thriller.
The film, directed by Tim Burton from a screenplay by John Logan, is everything a Sweeney Todd fan could have hoped for. Even the riskiest choice–casting nonsingers in roles that ordinarily require performers with three-octave ranges–turns out to have been inspired. The numbers performed by costars Johnny Depp (amazing) and Helena Bonham Carter (surpassing all expectations) seem to emerge from their pained conversation and their deepest and darkest wishes, not from the impeccable diaphragms of practiced singers with years of training.
But it is impossible to discuss the Sweeney Todd movie without making the very simple point that any person who finds on-screen violence difficult to stomach should not even attempt to watch a moment of it after the 30-minute mark. In all its incarnations, Sweeney Todd is a work of surpassing beauty, but it also aims to frighten and disturb in the manner of Victorian melodramas and the Grand Guignol, the fin-de-siècle Paris theater that specialized in making its audiences believe eyes were being gouged out and innards pulled from the bodies of live actors on stage. The original Broadway director Harold Prince left as little to the imagination as he possibly could on a gargantuan Broadway stage, and induced gasps and cries of alarm even from audience members who were sitting 30 yards away from the action.
In the movie, throats are slit in close-up. Blood spatters the lens. Sound-effects specialists worked hard to perfect the gurgling and choking noises a victim of such a crime would emit, and they have succeeded. And when Sweeney Todd opens the trap door under his barber chair to dispose of his victim’s body, Burton follows it down the chute until the head smashes into the concrete floor of the bakehouse, the body crumpling behind it.
Sondheim offers a savage irony in counterpoint, as Sweeney performs a heartbroken lament for the now-grown daughter ripped unjustly from him in her infancy by a judge who raped his wife, adopted the baby, and had him transported to Australia: “And in that darkness when I’m blind with what I can’t forget,” he sings, “It’s always morning in my mind, my little lamb, my pet, Johanna.”
The melody is gentle and mournful. And when he completes it, Sweeney garrots another customer. The gorgeous song serves to make the murder all the more horrible; the ugliness of the murder only highlights the beauty of the song. Even those in the audience who love slasher movies may be overwhelmed by the sequence, since it really does create an entirely new kind of horror-movie effect.
After Burton takes his audience into the bakehouse, where we see a huge vat of ground beef in which human fingers are clearly detectable, and where an innocent little boy is taught how to use the grinder, many people will have had more than enough, and they will be justified in walking out and demanding a refund at the box office.
Burton’s decision to be brutal and graphic was a necessary one. If he had held back, Sweeney Todd might come across as lovable and his compatriot Mrs. Lovett as a distaff Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple, and the whole project would have descended into camp.
Tim Burton means business, and he has done right by Sweeney Todd. It is the best movie he has ever made, and it features the best performance Johnny Depp has ever given. But no one need feel himself a philistine or Babbitt if he has a visceral reaction comparable to Brooks Atkinson’s about Pal Joey and decides that this remarkable movie isn’t merely a foul well, but an open sewer.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
