Cottonmouth Press

I will say up front that I am a girl who likes her movies noir.

On my top-picks list are The Grifters, The Last Seduction, Apocalypse Now and the Coen Brothers’ murder saga, Blood Simple. So you would think that I’d be enamored of this season’s top-rated “Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
Alas, even I, who have the stomach for pert near everything grim, had to turn my head for about 20 percent of this movie. It is unrelentingly dark.

Take the plot, an unbroken line of negativity. A man is falsely imprisoned, loses his wife and daughter in the process, spends the years behind bars plotting revenge on the man who engineered his arrest, returns home to commit dozens of grisly murders by straight razor and dies in the end. You see what I mean? 

The set and art design of the film are director Tim Burton’s, and if you’ve seen his other movies, you know that the brightest color in the film will be navy blue. Yes, Olde London was a dank and dark place, to be sure. In Burton’s hands, the film has the appearance of having been shot in black and white and then slightly colorized. And yet, in reevaluating the movie on the drive home, it was to
Burton’s haunting, bleak sets that I gave highest marks.

As a musical, Sweeney Todd has brilliant lyrics but music that is forgotten as soon as a number is over. (With maybe the exception of the sweetly melodic song, “Not While I’m Around.”) Some of the original Broadway tunes (Stephen Sondheim music and lyrics) have been cut. It is of little importance that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter don’t have trained voices. These are songs designed to be acted more so than sung. Alan Rickman, as Sweeney’s nemesis, has a lovely baritone and Sasha Baron Cohen (as the rival barber Adolfo Pirelli), sings his part sufficiently well.
Cohen, late of Borat, manages somehow to be costumed in a highly elastic-looking jumpsuit that shows the outline of private parts. Quite anachronistic in Victorian-era
London.

Brooding, morose, angry and vengeful are the four moods of Sweeney Todd, and Johnny Depp does them well.  I have no quibble with the acting or the pace of the movie, although things slowed for me every time a romantic boy-meets-girl subplot took over. So what is the problem with this movie?

It is that, after one throat is slit in the barber chair and we see the spurting blood (a geyser in some cases), do we really need to see 11 more throat cuttings? Sweeney’s singleminded rampage is too predictable: Get someone in the barber chair, strop the razor and slash, slash, slash.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I guess that is all you really can do with a story line that has one single trajectory. I have to differ from the newspaper critics who adored this movie.

 Strange as it sounds, the violence bored me in the end.

Posted by Gita under National |