Sweeney Todd

I kind of have a love-hate relationship with Tim Burton. Love: Beetlejuice, Batman (of course). Hate: Big Fish, Planet of the Apes.

But when I say love, I mean: love. Beetlejuice for whatever quirky reason is one of the top ten comfort films of all time for us as a group.

And Batman… well I really should drag up one of my university friends and get them to come read this blog and comment on Batman. I got through the stress of first year university by obsessing on Batman, and I am not kidding when I say obsessing – my dorm room was covered in paraphenalia, I wore Batman jewelry, wrote two Batman “scripts” (nowadays I hear the kids call that fanfic, but back then, it was called “crazy stupid shit”) and booked the dorm television/vcr at 2 am every night to watch it again.

Oh yes and I bought every pot of poster paint in the town to paint a Batman mural in the stairwell of my dorm, which led to an offer to attend art classes in the fine arts program, which is highly fucking odd since I didn’t, at that time, draw or paint at all. I bet some of you did not realize how weird I am, or have been, huh?

But even now in my calm, supposedly outgrown fangirl way, I remember how Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman and perhaps more to the point, Gotham city, with its purples and blacks, and Michael Keaton’s really nutso Batman just hit something, some deep nerve way down in the heart of our archetypal souls. For me particularly, I think, the core of it maybe was trauma turned to heroism – but not an easy heroism; a questionable, brooding, sick sort of crazy heroism.

Even with that creative debt though – a year longer of external stability filtered through images of urban dystopia? A film that almost no matter what, ever, can make us laugh even at suicidal impulses and questions of god and afterlife? – Big Fish almost did me in on the Tim Burton thing.

Also, since losing Emily, we have lost our skin for gore and even serial killer type movies. I’m not really referring to slash’n'hack stuff as that was never something that we were really into all that much; I mean more the Silence of the Lambs psychological twisty film or the weirdo pseudoreligion of things like The Order, which we used to enjoy. Pretty much anything dealing with death other than in Harry-Potter fashion has dropped off our movie going radar.

So I’m not really entirely sure how we ended up spending one of our precious moviegoing chits on Sweeney Todd, particularly since we went at a time that Lynn could not see it with Li, but we did. And am I ever glad. This one definitely goes on the love list.

I didn’t have any real exposure to the musical, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. We do like Sondheim enough to have been concerned about the whole film adaptation thing, but I think it worked beautifully. Sure, some of the singers – ok, the women – would have had a really hard time carrying it onstage, but it didn’t really matter because it was so closely shot and so well acted that all they had to do was not suck.

And Johnny Depp proved once again that he just does immoral so well. His energy was astounding – the scene where he paces above the customers at the pie shop was so feral and predatorial that you have to wonder if he isn’t part – I don’t know, goth-tiger, or something. Helena Bonham Carter was the real surprise though, because it is very, very hard to carry off sociopathic and yet lovesick without becoming some kind of Hannibal Lecter charicature, but she took the part and made it her own.

But once again what really sucked us in was the world. Tim Burton’s London wasn’t a reprise of Gotham but its own, bleak, Victorian sort of ignorant, stupid evil. A world half a step to the left where one can be a little gleeful about serial killing just because – everything is so sick. The whole film was very, very nice visually – impressionistic where the gore was concerned, playful, somber, brooding and yet jeweled. It matched the story beautifully, I think – but I also think it hit that nerve in us again, that over-the-top, we-know-this-isn’t-real but it-feels-like-inside anyway. So I think I’m in love again.

This is clearly not an unbiased review but in the spirit of service blogging I will add that there are a couple of weaknesses, even if your taste runs to the amusingly macabre. (And if it doesn’t, stay away.) The love story was truncated to the point of being almost squirmingly ridiculous. Alan Rickman was brilliant but a little underutilized. Bonham Carter’s singing would probably be a bit hard to take for anyone more vocally trained than us. And if you don’t like Sondheim, obviously, you are not going to like this film one bit.

But if it’s up your alley, go see it anyway.