Word: burtons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theater-savvy friend Victor Nelson asked me a few weeks ago about Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tim Burton's film version of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical. He wondered if Helena Bonham Carter was up to the vocal challenge of the Mrs. Lovett role. She's excellent, I replied; but aren't you anxious about Johnny Depp as the mad barber? He's not a trained singer. "Oh," Victor said with a knowing laugh, "Johnny Depp can do anything...
...they - Burton, screenwriter John Logan, the whole cast and crew - they've done it. This adaptation of the Hugh Wheeler libretto (from Christopher Bond's play) is both faithful and liberating. The story, of a bitter man in 19th century London who has lost his wife and child and determines to carve out his revenge, has never seemed so human or so bleak. It's no longer just a Guignol songfest, staring at its creatures, with fascination but not pity, from an Olympian distance above the cage in which they claw at one another. Inside this sarcophagus of a play...
...Burton takes a purchase on our more elevated emotions by showing the source of Sweeney's rage. Fifteen years earlier he was a sweet young man, named Benjamin Barker. His beloved wife and young daughter were ripped from him by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who exiled him to Australia. So Sweeney is a romantic tragic figure; he has fallen from a great height -off the cloud of his belief that love can last forever. Now he knows better, and throws himself into this amorality play. It's man devouring man, vengeance destroying ideals...
...Sweeney Todd might have been written for Burton. It's a festival of his obsessions, set to dissonant music. Batman: a mysterious crusader prowls through the night, administering justice as he sees it. Beetlejuice, the dead (Sweeney and his victims) dwell just above the living (Mrs. Lovett and her customers). Sweeney is a figure of pathos with a sure tonsorial touch: Edward Scissorhands, meet Edward Razorhands. As in so many of his films, and all the ones starring Depp, Burton celebrates oddball outsiders who create their own rules, and often perish by them. The new movie also gives a darker...
...Burton film that is closest visually to Sweeney Todd is Sleepy Hollow, the 1999 fable about innocence trapped inside malevolence. The desaturated color scheme of that film, set in 18th century New York City, is here applied to the streets of London a few decades later. But whereas Burton bent an old legend to comic-horror ends, this time he's not kidding. The shadows aren't faux-ominous, they are expressions of the city's pestilence of selfishness and cruelty, where the motives of virtually everyone - both lowlife and high-born - are venal and verminous...