Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

"Once you get past the absence of the immortal 'The Ballad of Sweeney Todd' (hard) and the fact that the leads, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, have little in the way of pipes (harder), Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is spellbinding," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Most directors open up Broadway musicals - adding meaningless busyness - to make them more 'cinematic,' and they end up diluting them. Burton, bless him, constricts the space and concentrates the melodrama; he finds the perfect balance between the funereal and the ferocious. Above all, he treasures these ghouls: He digs both their bloodlust and their melancholy. You can imagine the moment he decided to make the movie: 'Edward Scissorhands is out for revenge, with no time for topiary! He cuts hair and throats!'"

Updated through 12/23.

"The whole work drips with a camp savagery (hence the presence of Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, a rival barber and faux-Italianate fop), which in turn relies on the conviction that death itself, like sexual desire, exists to be sniffed at and chuckled over," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "That is fine for a film like Beetlejuice, but Sondheim is serious about the misanthropic malice of his hero, whereas Depp's Sweeney comes across as one more mournful Burton wacko.... The best reason to see Sweeney Todd is Toby (Edward Sanders), a boy from the workhouse who helps, in all innocence, to dish out the pies. Some of the gravest performances this year have come from children - Shélan O'Keefe as John Cusack's daughter in Grace Is Gone, and Dillon Freasier as Daniel Day-Lewis's son in There Will Be Blood - and Sanders, like them, has the extraordinary gift of appearing to age, in sorrow as in knowledge, with the unfolding of the film."

For the New York Times, Jesse Green talks with Sondheim, who understood "that remaking Sweeney would be risky and involve major surgery. Still, he eagerly wielded the razor on perhaps his greatest work."

And by the way, congrats are in order for Burton and Bonham Carter. As the AP reports, their 4-year-old, Billy, now has a little sister.

Earlier: "Sweeney Todd, 11/30."

Updates, 12/18: "Burton's richly atmospheric evocation of the nightmarish metropolis with its grimy alleys and dismal byways is no surprise, but the director redeems past wobbly-toned disappointments like Big Fish and Sleepy Hollow (let alone Planet of the Apes), by working here with iron focus, no doubt responding to the composer's on-set presence throughout shooting," writes Robert Keser in Slant. "Together with Johnny Depp's commanding performance in the title role, they impressively sustain the single-minded momentum of an anvil dropping and succeed in elevating Sweeney's revenge from mere payback to earth-turning tragedy.... Keeping every performer on point, Burton draws the strongly structured material together to produce a black comedy and still blacker tragedy surging with jugular urgency. It haunts the mind for days."

"Burton has taken Sondheim's quasi-operatic, mock-penny-dreadful exercise in Dickensian-Brechtian Grand Guignol as the pretext for something highly personal and typically obsessive," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "From its magnificently gory credits to its climactic bloodbath pietà, the director makes it clear that this is his meat. As much as he's a filmmaker, Burton is also a graphic artist in the tradition of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey - and here he's successfully incorporated Sweeney Todd into his own distinctively dank and spidery gothic world."

"Sweeney Todd isn't just a work about splintered morality that requires the ability to sing. It's high culture, full of deliciously bitter contradictions, made of concert-caliber music, sharp words and a pentameter that would send mainstream theater singers running for a Wicked audition. And it's low culture, based on a 19th century legend of a serial killer who slices throats." For the Los Angeles Times, Adam Baer talks to the main players to get the story of the film's making.

Updates, 12/19: "Sondheim's characteristic mix of sentimentality, misanthropy, and high art is as Broadway as an $18 souvenir program," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "And Burton's best movie since Ed Wood 13 years ago succeeds precisely because it finds ways to be faithful to the source material in particular details while turning the whole into a Tim Burton film - a black comedy–cum–horror movie, albeit one blacker and more horrific than any he's made before."

"Burton's gotten his groove back," agrees the Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns. "Depp and Bonham Carter are wonderful, save for one teensy caveat: They can't sing.... I guess it's testament to both the gonzo power of the source material and the completeness of Burton's vision that Sweeney Todd still works in spite of this rather large and crippling flaw."

"After a run of baggy tall tales and mannered creepy-looniness that's felt thuddingly familiar from frame one of each film, Tim Burton is clearly crafting to scale and to order here instead of working over Sondheim's much-loved musical into another 'idiosyncratic' extravaganza," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

In the Boston Phoenix Brett Michel revels in "the thrill of Burton and Depp making music again, for the very first time."

Online viewing tip. Erik Davis introduces a clip featuring Burton and Depp talking about their working relationship.

Updates, 12/20: Burton's Sweeney Todd "isn't a groundbreaking or innovative piece of filmmaking, but it's as satisfying a screen version of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Grand Guignol operetta as I can imagine," writes the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "And of all the new-generation Hollywood musicals (Chicago, Hairspray, et al), it's the only one that succeeds both musically and cinematically. It breathes new life into the genre by dousing it in buckets of blood."

"Burton is at his best using flesh-and-blood figures for his comic-macabre visions (Mars Attacks, Sleepy Hollow) and his eccentric empathy for outsiders might have redeemed composer Stephen Sondheim's ghoulishly unfunny theatrical conceit about 'The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,'" writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Instead, this well-sung and perfectly acted adaptation falls way short of a triumph because Burton misplaces his sense of humor."

"Burton and Depp continue to evoke the silent film-era partnership of director Tod Browning and actor Lon Chaney, vivifying a shared love of the macabre and creating a gallery of doomed heroes," writes Laura Boyes in the Independent Weekly. "But, in spite of some tasty bits, Sweeney Todd is a disappointing holiday treat."

"Sweeney Todd ranks among this year's most intense, haunting, and startling films; the fact that it also features great songs by Stephen Sondheim is just gravy on the meat pie," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Like Atonement, this season's other high-profile adaptation of a highbrow contemporary text once thought to be unadaptable, Burton's crack at Sweeney Todd works best when it serves to support the inherent perversity of its source," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "The director's mashup of Steven Sondheim's musical with his own, patented, teenage Goth sketchbook aesthetic may play like German Expressionists-do-Torture Porn, but the brutality is mostly farce. As in Sondheim, Burton's Sweeney Todd is most disturbing when it's talking about love."

"Burton has been trying to get this project off the ground for two decades, but unlike so many Hollywood directors' pet projects, this one doesn't feel locked up in its creator's head," writes Paul Matwychuk. "It's got a mad, slashing excitement that hopefully will get people past their squeamishness at the sight of blood. As Sweeney himself cries out, 'I'm alive at last, and I'm full of joy!'"

"[A]udiences accustomed to the comparatively more restrained musical will be covering their eyes and ears and not noticing the absence of 'Ah, Miss' and 'Parlor Songs,'" writes Robert Cashill. "I suggest leaving them open, simply to enjoy the lush orchestrations (by Jonathan Tunick, wisely retained from the Broadway original) and the ripely decayed and decadent Victorian atmosphere conjured by production designer Dante Ferretti, in Hammer horror mode. Using the 'bleach-bypass' technique that gave 1995's Se7en its sickly serial killer sheen, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski has all but drained the imposing imagery of its color, the better for the red to stand out."

Sweeney is "one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease, and the performers - Depp the most protean of them - have a grand time with it all. Sweeney Todd is an apt cinematic paradox, a beautiful nightmare."

Updates, 12/23: "It must say something about my mood of late that it wasn't until the sprays of arterial red splashed the screen en masse in Sweeney Todd that I felt an inkling of Christmas spirit." David Lowery.

"Sweeney is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme - I am tempted to say evil - genius."

The Stranger's Dan Savage: "If I were less of a fag, I wouldn't have the original 1979 Broadway cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on my iPod. If I were less of a fag, I wouldn't have watched the 1982 Emmy Award–winning television broadcast of the national tour of Sweeney Todd - featuring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn - seven or eight thousand times.... In short, if I weren't such a great, big, huge, fucking faggot... I might have enjoyed Tim Burton's new film version of Sweeney Todd more than I did."

"Sweeney Todd the musical is filled with death but it will never die," writes Nathaniel Rogers at Zoom In. "No matter which production you see: the grand and comically-tinged Harold Prince original Broadway production; the recent John Doyle Broadway revival which used minimalism and haunting abstract suggestions; and now Tim Burton's (mostly) deadly serious and macabre telling, you're still seeing Sondheim's masterpiece.... This is Tim Burton's best film in years... and in every way it's a Tim Burton film. But Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is still blessedly always the work of the greatest living musical theater composer, Stephen Sondheim."

For Tom Hall, this is "towering achievement, a near-perfect cinematic interpretation of one of the theater's most staggering compositions."

"[T]here's a note of discomfort to the film that grows as the ghoulish humor finally drops away," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "There's no space at all for softness in the latter part of Sweeney Todd, and as a result the film seems a little lost, uncertain in what, to avoid spoilers, we'll leave as a very unhappy ending."

Noel Murray presents a Sondheim primer at the AV Club, where Keith Phipps writes, "Though it took 28 years to make it to the screen, this musical about revenge and its repercussions seems fitting for our revenge-steeped times."

"Sweeney Todd might have been written for Burton," suggests Richard Corliss in Time. "Batman: a mysterious crusader prowls through the night, administering justice as he sees it. BeetlejuiceSweeney, "it's bloody great."

"[N]o matter what I think of the music in Sweeney Todd, I'm willing to believe there have been terrific, entertaining stage productions of the show that both make the most of the story's grim wit and make you feel something for the characters," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But in this Sweeney Todd, Burton has ground those possibilities into a grayish chalky powder. The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it."

"Critics seem to have settled on 'Grand Guignol' as operating principle here, but Sweeney Todd is maybe a bit too Grand for its own good," writes Mark Asch in Stop Smiling. "It's all danse, no macabre."

"Many have dismissed Tim Burton as a goofy Goth visionary who has never met a narrative he couldn't defang," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Even worse, some have suggested that, as his mainstream acceptance has grown, his artistic acumen has faded. Not true - and his brand new version of Sweeney Todd is more than enough proof. As the perfect marriage of maker and material, this dark, disturbing splatter-etta stands as the best film of 2007."

"Sweeney Todd may be the most outrageously macabre piece of musical theater ever created, but Burton can't help but make it pretty too - from the gloomy, rain-slicked streets of Victorian London, to the moony Goth stylishness of its leads, to the split-open pomegranate throats of Sweeney's unsuspecting victims and the various torrents, geysers and wellsprings of glow-in-the-dark blood that spurt from them," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

In the Washington Post, Peter Marks approves of the pruning: "If anything, John Logan's screenplay homes in more deftly on the psyche of Sweeney, who in the handsome Depp's smudgy eye makeup and deathly pallor somehow seems more Byronic, less demonic than his Broadway predecessors."

"Had Baz Luhrmann directed, we might've had something sensational," suggests JJ at As Little as Possible. "Instead, with fauxteur Tim Burton at the helm, Sweeney Todd is a makeup-caked dirge, an Edward Gorey strip come to life, the type of musical a depressed and/or homicidal high-schooler might enjoy."

"[T]here is an exhilaration in the very fiber of the film, because its life force is so strong," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Its heroes, or anti-heroes, have been wounded to the quick, its villains are vile and heartless, and they all play on a stage that rules out decency and mercy.... As a feast for the eyes and the imagination, Sweeney Todd is... well, I was going to say, even more satisfying than a hot meat pie made out of your dad."

"Yes, the sung dialogue tells the story, but having it whispered insinuatingly into your ear stops it feeling horribly unrealistic," writes David Benedict in the Observer. "Instead, the music amplifies the characters' thoughts and dramatizes their deeds."

"Depp - the most extraordinary film actor of his generation - has the luxury of closeups and carefully controlled lighting, so he can act in infinitely subtler gradations," adds Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "As a result, his Todd is simultaneously far scarier and far more poignant."

"Depp's intense committed performance along with Sondheim's music and lyrics (most likely his best score) upstage Tim Burton's direction, and that's as it should be," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

For Edward Copeland, it's "nowhere near as bad as I feared, but neither is it as good as it could have been."

"Stylized but spasmodic, this Sweeney seems more interested in distancing than captivating an audience," writes Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Sweeney starts off strong but outstays its welcome by half an hour," writes John Constantine at Nerve.

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2007 1:56 AM