Movie review: Sweeney Todd
Jan. 1st, 2008 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjI decided not to try to hunt down any New Years Eve parties to attend and this was a Good Decision because I ended up nodding off to sleep around 8pm watching DVDs (I just picked up a set of the 1987 Peter Wimsey mystery mini-series with Edward Petherbridge). I mostly just dithered around and got some shopping done. With the groceries put away, I bicycled over to the Emery Bay Theater and took in Sweeney Todd
I've gradually come to the realization that any time Johnny Depp shows up in an unusual role (wait, is that redundant?) it's worth checking out. The movies may not always click with me personally, but they're never boring or predictable. Sweeney Todd falls in this category, and yet I have to start out by saying that I did not enjoy this movie. The manic psychopathology of the character comes across too well, and I felt that the violence and gore never managed to move to the safe side of comic-book violence. So, to be blunt, the movie conveyed the underlying horror of the story entirely too well for me to be able to like it as entertainment. From a movie-making point of view, I consider this a high compliment. But I found myself never quite looking directly at any of the throat-cutting. It was too real.
The casting was one of the high points of the work, although it struck me that several of the actors are reprising roles that seem to be running themes through their careers. Depp -- well, what can one say? He's made a career out of investing bizarre characters with sufficient sincerety to make them "normal" and believable. (And who knew he could sing like that?) Helena Bonham-Carter is simply entirely too good as the devoted madwoman -- but I kept involuntarily superimposing her Mrs. Lovett with her Belatrix Lestrange and even with a touch of her Morgan Le Fey. This probably means I should go cleanse my mind with a few of her rather different roles. And Alan Rickman could have done Judge Turpin with a bag over his head and that wonderful voice could have carried off the part all by itself.
But what really struck me as the artistic high point of the movie was the use of color. The default visuals were muted and filtered to give the impression of a sepia-tone Daguerreotype, evoking not only photos of the era of the setting, but providing a metaphor for the absense of hope and color in the characters lives. This default is broken by the red of passion: the red of blood during the murders, or the red of the Pompeiian scenes decorating Turpin's library and representing the passions driving his actions. (The young lovers don't get red, they seem to stick with white for innocence.) Another color-break comes in Lovett's fantasy-sequence, reinforcing the equation of the sepia-monotone with the absense of hope.
I liked that the integrity of the musical format was retained. On a stage, the conventions and expectations of the musical form have to carry a lot of the story and setting, and there can be a temptation when converting a musical to the screen to take advantage of the greater scope for cinematic storytelling and tone down the structure as a musical. In this case, the product was very clearly a filmed musical rather than a movie with singing. I did miss the presence of the one song I knew from the stage production: the title song, which could easily have been included as background for the closing credits, in my opinion. On the other hand, I knew going in that they'd omitted that number, so it wasn't an unexpected frustration.
Overall judgement: I found enough in the movie to analyze and appreciate on an artistic level that it made up for being rather badly squicked by the story itself. I wouldn't go back and see it a second time, but I could easily imagine that others would enjoy doing so.
I've gradually come to the realization that any time Johnny Depp shows up in an unusual role (wait, is that redundant?) it's worth checking out. The movies may not always click with me personally, but they're never boring or predictable. Sweeney Todd falls in this category, and yet I have to start out by saying that I did not enjoy this movie. The manic psychopathology of the character comes across too well, and I felt that the violence and gore never managed to move to the safe side of comic-book violence. So, to be blunt, the movie conveyed the underlying horror of the story entirely too well for me to be able to like it as entertainment. From a movie-making point of view, I consider this a high compliment. But I found myself never quite looking directly at any of the throat-cutting. It was too real.
The casting was one of the high points of the work, although it struck me that several of the actors are reprising roles that seem to be running themes through their careers. Depp -- well, what can one say? He's made a career out of investing bizarre characters with sufficient sincerety to make them "normal" and believable. (And who knew he could sing like that?) Helena Bonham-Carter is simply entirely too good as the devoted madwoman -- but I kept involuntarily superimposing her Mrs. Lovett with her Belatrix Lestrange and even with a touch of her Morgan Le Fey. This probably means I should go cleanse my mind with a few of her rather different roles. And Alan Rickman could have done Judge Turpin with a bag over his head and that wonderful voice could have carried off the part all by itself.
But what really struck me as the artistic high point of the movie was the use of color. The default visuals were muted and filtered to give the impression of a sepia-tone Daguerreotype, evoking not only photos of the era of the setting, but providing a metaphor for the absense of hope and color in the characters lives. This default is broken by the red of passion: the red of blood during the murders, or the red of the Pompeiian scenes decorating Turpin's library and representing the passions driving his actions. (The young lovers don't get red, they seem to stick with white for innocence.) Another color-break comes in Lovett's fantasy-sequence, reinforcing the equation of the sepia-monotone with the absense of hope.
I liked that the integrity of the musical format was retained. On a stage, the conventions and expectations of the musical form have to carry a lot of the story and setting, and there can be a temptation when converting a musical to the screen to take advantage of the greater scope for cinematic storytelling and tone down the structure as a musical. In this case, the product was very clearly a filmed musical rather than a movie with singing. I did miss the presence of the one song I knew from the stage production: the title song, which could easily have been included as background for the closing credits, in my opinion. On the other hand, I knew going in that they'd omitted that number, so it wasn't an unexpected frustration.
Overall judgement: I found enough in the movie to analyze and appreciate on an artistic level that it made up for being rather badly squicked by the story itself. I wouldn't go back and see it a second time, but I could easily imagine that others would enjoy doing so.
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Date: 2008-01-02 05:25 am (UTC)I'd never seen any version of Sweeney Todd previously, which was nice because there were a few plot points I got to experience unspoilt (e.g., the identity of the beggar woman, which I had successfully guessed).