2007: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, 2007) 9/10

"I Will Have Vengeance! (Sweeney Todd)

Since the days of the "penny dreadfuls," Victorian London's dank and dark narrow streets have offered us a cornucopia of thieves, swindlers and murderers. From Dickensian workhouses to Jack the Ripper, 19th century London has been mythologized as a sordid terminal for criminal activities; subsequently branding a series of gloomy images into our minds and cultural impressions.

Whilst the age brought us scientific advancements by Charles Darwin and Alexander Graham Bell, it is the bloodlust, exploitation and deviousness lying within the belly of an elephantine empire that modern culture remains most interested in.
Recorded in the literature of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, these themes and motifs have been extended and preserved by Hollywood.

In 1980, David Lynch directed the masterful The Elephant Man about John Merrick, whose disfigurement was showcased for commercial profit; in 2001, Johnny Depp entered these quarters as an opium-addled detective in From Hell a stylish, underrated period thriller by the Hughes brothers. In 2007, Depp once again forayed into the seedy underbelly of Victorian Britain in Tim Burton's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The title character is an amalgamation of fact, fiction and urban legend: a serial killer driven to madness and obsession after his true love is taken away from him. In the film, Johnny Depp stars as Benjamin Barker, a renowned and happily married Fleet Street barber, who is sent to fifteen years of hard labour in the colonies on false charges by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman); a sinister figure who lusts for Barker's young wife. Rescued by sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), Barker returns to London vowing vengeance on those who stole his life from him.

Upon re-emerging in London, Barker finds his former home is now a rundown restaurant owned by Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who gleefully serves "the worst pies in London." Hearing that his wife has poisoned herself and his daughter is now a ward of the Judge, Barker re-fashions himself as Sweeney Todd and along with the smitten Lovett plots his revenge. He is further assisted in his plans by Anthony Hope who, after catching a glimpse of Todd's daughter Johanna (Jayne Wiesner), yearns for her heart.

While Nellie Lovett lusts for Todd's broken heart, the brooding and impatient barber begins to utilize his profession for barbary, rather than barbering. To placate his embittered soul and cravings for cruel justice, Todd begins to transform his acts of violence into a singular and calculated act of reprisal, but into a random outburst against a society at large that has allowed for the destruction and wasted hours of his life.

The specter of obsession dominates Burton's film. These obsessions are usually of the heart, in the hope of obtaining a desired figure. Yet, these possessive lusts are often one-sided and selfish: lacking a reciprocal beating of hearts. The one-dimensional nature of these overriding infatuations is ultimately crushing. Only those with a mutual love obtain the happiness they desire. For others, their compulsions hasten their downfall and the destruction of their facile minded souls.

Similarly, the film's sub-narrative regarding the content of Lovett's pies is also indicative of a society that gorges upon violence and is willing to accept murderousness as a necessary component. As Lovett changes the ingredients in her pies, she gains a previously absent degree of fame and fortune, in spite of the macabre composition of her creations. Yet, as Burton's film and Sondheim's musical note, only one figure begs to question the morality of those consuming Lovett's pies. Interestingly, this character is an insane homeless woman, whose own fractured sense of scope is able to see through the advertising and falseness associated with Lovett's mini-enterprise.

Throughout his career, Burton has not been a director associated with extensive socio-political commentary in his films and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is no exception. Rather like Vincente Minnelli before him, Burton is an aesthete: a visual artist who creates fantastic images imbued with the grotesque and maligned in society. Like Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands, Burton channels the familiar Gothic tones of his filmography into a stylish, blood-soaked musical that never descends into parody.

Burton and his cast do not turn the picture into an excessive pantomime. Both Depp and Bonham Carter are perfectly cast in their roles. The actors sing in naturalistic tones that fervently express their frenzied emotional states. Depp's character is reigned in not through visceral bombast, but the sulking anguish within his soul. His frantic hair and melancholy blackened eyes are those of a man suffering from an incurable insomnia brought upon by tragedy and extirpation. Despite, her gloomy appearance, Bonham Carter's Nellie is a wonderfully naive figure, driven by her salacious attitude toward the barber; a point exemplified in an imaginative sequence in which Lovett daydreams about their future.

Alan Rickman is deftly cast as the imposing Judge. While Rickman is usually selected for his deep vocal tones, his seething eyes and imposing figure are perfectly suited for his character. The villainous supporting cast including Sascha Baron Cohen as the faux-Italian rival barber Pirelli and Timothy Spall as the Judge's henchmen Beadle Bramford offer deliciously poisonous vehicles for Todd to act out his revenge.

Utilizing the sadness and hate within his characters, Burton crafts an internalized musical. Unlike traditional Hollywood musicals, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not a bombastic colourful romp. Rather it is a bitingly dark disclosure of the soul. Under the auspices of another director, the feelings and emotions divulged through songs of rage could easily have turned into extraneous feats. Yet, in Burton's hands, these sentiments are closeted entries into the private enclaves of humanity. The result is a rich, blackened musical of the human spirit and the raw obsessive reactions it emits.

One of the best films of 2007.

* Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is released by Warner Brothers

Other Tim Burton Films Reviewed:
Big Fish (2003) 9/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2003: Big Fish

Big Fish (Burton, 2003) 9/10

" I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine" (Senior Edward Bloom)

Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is a storyteller. Correction. In his mind, Edward Bloom is a storyteller: a dispenser of wisdom, joviality and authenticity. In the opinion of his journalist son, Will (Billy Crudup), his father is less of an accurate recollecter of memories and more of a charlatan, a myth of a man: a novelty salesman engrossed by the egotistical nature of his yarns. He is the Aesop of Alabama.

The chaotic conflict between father and son produces an aeon of accepted silence. The internalized stubborness of one man, rejects the embellishments of another. But when tragedy strikes and Will is forced home, his journey is less of a desire to see his ailing father in his dying days, but rather to find the allusive pieces to the latter's puzzling and enigmatic life. The result is a Fellini-esque cauldron of visual delights in director Tim Burton's second masterpiece after 1994's Ed Wood.

Known for his eccentric Gothic style, Burton has become marginalized as a distributor of dark charms and ghoulish imagery. A former Disney cartoonist, who left animation to create some of the most ecletic visuals of the past two decades. Films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and his two dated offerings to the pre-Christopher Nolan Batman catalogue have cemented this position. Yet, Burton's best work has often been found in the films, the general public has most readily neglected such as 1994's Ed Wood. The latter, like Big Fish is a wonderful blend of gregarious enthusiasm and melancholic surroundings. Whereas Depp's portayal of the title character instilled colour into Burton's monochrome vision, the director flushes Big Fish with a hyperactive style that strangely complements its low-key emotionalism.

A diverse pastiche of cinematic flavours, Big Fish re-creates the dynamic, hyperactive tall-tales of Ed Bloom through a romanticized interpretation of his past. Several critics including Jonathan Rosenbaum have criticized Burton for creating a film set in the Deep South that negates and downplays the racist aspects of southern society in the 1950's. Yet, Rosenbaum and the majority of the film's other detractors have overlooked a key facet of Bloom's stories. In each interlocking tale, Bloom's character is the centrepiece with a revolving door of stock characters at his disposal. The characters symbolic latitude far outweighs their authentic context.

These are centerpieces in a larger metaphor: embellishments designed to sparkle mundane events. Like in many collective memories, the past becomes distorted and romanticized to the point of absurdity. Edward Bloom's tales are absurd. Nothing terrible ever occurs to Bloom in these stories, as they are merely ways to demonstrate his majestic conquering of love, destiny and life. Genuine social and personal problems are selectively overlooked, because they do not adhere to the populist positivist outlook on life Bloom has. Showing civil strife and unrest is unlikely in Bloom's memories, not necessarily because the character is not interested in them, but because the character's rememoration operates in a space of absolute harmony.

The perceived selfishness of Bloom's stories belies their selfless metaphoric qualities. This is not like Robert Zemecksis' Forrest Gump in which one ordinary simpleton achieves extraordinary feats; rather this a film in which an ordinary dreamer concocts and manifests the extraordinary out of life's everyday activities: spicing them up with peppered layers of intrigue to allow for better dissemination. Through Ewan McGregor's portrayal of the young Edward Bloom, Burton allows these stories to be grounded in an earthiness, despite their oddball nature. This is clearly due to McGregor's charming ways in being able to extract some of the Fifties charm he satirized in Peyton Reed's Down With Love and ensnare it once more into Burton's film.

At its core, Big Fish is a picture about father-son reconciliation, yet Burton's handling of the film's emotional sequences is grafted with great integrity. Big Fish never becomes sappy or corny: its sentimentality is utilized for more investigative purposes. Through his mawkish analysis, Burton pushes forth the notion of a fearless individual attempting to craft a narrative synchronized to his epic scope.

Utilizing the fish motif, Burton is able to address the elder Bloom as a human "fish out of water." This is done through repeated references to Bloom requiring water, noting the slippery qualities of his nature and his unquenchable thirst for life and adventure. The film's moving bathtub sequence between the dying Bloom and his wife Sandra (played by Jessica Lange) further re-inforces this concept in the notion that Bloom fears he "will dry out:" losing his vitality and in the process the exaggerations and half-truths that shape his version of the past.

In piecing together, his father's stories, the journalistic and investigative Will begins to realize the two separate halves to the art of storytelling. Will represents the accurate, literal tendencies of modern journalism, while his father represents an oral tradition of a bygone era: a time of contextual storytelling in which the moral of the story held greater intent than the individual words. Through his investigations, Will uncovers the true essence of his father. Yet, he begins to realize that arguably the carefully constructed memories his father has told for decades are arguably a more accurate definition of his father's character. The truth is caught between the fantastic and realistic elements of life, in which fantasy and reality intertwine.

Here, Edward Bloom is less of a liar and more of an original folk artist: a product of his culture and environment. Through his stories, we see a man readily combating prejudice, fear and doubt. The town of Spectre demonstrates Bloom's perspectives clearly. Over time his opinions and memories become altered and thus his actions reflect in due course. In saving Spectre, Bloom preserves the collective romanticized memories of an entire people from modernism.

Public heritage and private recollections are important interlocking ideas for Edward Bloom because through preservation and oral recollection, the stories of others and himself can live on beyond what French memory historian Pierre Nora would term the memory's "shelf life:" the expiration date all memories hold when all their original participants are lost through the natural effects of time and age.

And it is these morals and life lessons that Edward Bloom accrues and disperses through his stories: a collection of images, ideas and concepts true to heart. It is through their ritualized reinforcement that his purpose as a storyteller is achieved and thus by passing on his legacy to his son, Edward Bloom is able to immortalize himself. In creating a film of beautiful imagery, poignant drama and surrealist Fellini-esque ideas, Tim Burton has created a wonderfully acted celebration of life's joys, imagined or not.


* Big Fish is available through Columbia Home Video

Other Tim Burton Films Reviewed:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) 9/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque