Admirers of Stephen Sondheim who have wondered whether a riveting movie would ever be made from one of his stage musicals can put aside their doubts and worries: Tim Burton has finally accomplished it in his ravishing “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
With oceans of gore, rivers of luscious musicality and a bravura performance by Johnny Depp redolent of malevolence and magnetism, Burton brings Sondheim’s 1979 musical to the screen with a visual style informed by a truly cinematic feel for Grand Guignol. The movie opened Friday in Denver.
The added marvel is that the director has crafted a version of a stage musical that completely honors the source without being slavishly devoted to it. By excising choral numbers and highlighting the sorrow inside the sordidness of Sondheim’s wit-strewn score, Burton invites us into a more intimate communion with horrible yet hummable aspects of human nature.
Although most of the voices Burton employs to interpret the operatic songs belong to actors rather than to singers, Sondheim’s music — some of the most exquisite he has ever composed — does not seem to suffer.
The lushly romantic orchestrations by Broadway veteran Jonathan Tunick certainly help. Onstage, the coldness and cruelty of “Sweeney’s” London need to be balanced by the warmth of melodies powerfully delivered.
The requirement on the screen, however, is for the character-driven music to become more seamlessly a partner with the dialogue.
That integration has been carried out with surprising effectiveness, even in the performance of the extremely thin-voiced Helena Bonham Carter, who makes of her Mrs. Lovett — Sweeney’s cannibalistic comrade-in-harms — a woman less comical than, but just as poignant as, the Broadway character Angela Lansbury created 28 years ago.
It should be noted that the squeamish might find Burton’s virtuosic treatment of Sweeney’s serial murders — all in the context of his “work” as the demon barber of Fleet Street — occasions to turn away from the screen.
But others will recognize, in the slightly distorted consistency and color of what oozes out of everyone’s necks, that we are not in the domain here of chainsaw massacres, but art.
