Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton Film), 12.07

As this is a film based on a (wonderful) piece of musical theatre, it’s well within the scope of this blog. It’s also interesting because I (and others) seem to have very mixed feelings about it.

On the on hand, it is clearly very visually arresting and features some excellent performances. It’s periodically funny, and makes some effective cuts to the score to maintain the narrative drive on the screen. It’s certainly worth going to see, and is overall an enjoyable experience. However, I felt that the film didn’t fully come together. I was left, ultimately, with a nagging sense of unfulfillment, and that’s what I want to explore today.

For me, the central problem was the flat, conversational tone that the movie never seemed to shift. All the songs, and every scene, were performed as if it were routine, as if a damper had been put on all emotions. Todd’s killings for example, though gruesomely blood-soaked, were enacted with such nonchalance that they lost the power to appall, frighten or excite. While this was intended to show Todd’s obsession with killing Judge Turpin, it served instead to undermine the dramatic intensity of these scenes, which quickly became routine and somewhat flat.

I think perhaps part of the issue here is that the eminently theatrical language in which the musical is written has not been transposed to the screen with complete success. While it’s possible on stage to switch nimbly between scenes of deep emotional turmoil and macabre, carnivalesque violence, on screen it’s not quite as easy. Here, Burton creates such a strong visual setting for the piece, and establishes such a strong tone of strange emotional detachment that the film isn’t able to support the larger, more ebullient musical numbers or the joyfully extravagant ruthlessness with which Todd dispatches his victims.

While I recognize and value Burton’s seeming desire to find the emotional realism that could be obscured by a more over-the-top interpretation, I think here he’s gone too far in the other direction, obscuring the delightful insanity that is at the true heart of this musical.