Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 2007 vividly blends Stephen Sondheim’s musical with the chilling roots of the 19th-century penny dreadful, writes WILLIAM BOVE
TITLE: Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
RELEASED: 2007
DIRECTOR: Tim Burton
CAST: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen
Review of Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 2007
Everything in Sweeney Todd is sharp: the theme, tone, mood, story, and acting are as sharp as Todd’s blade. Every aspect of Gothic Horror/Gothic Romanticism is featured and featured well – with true expression and meat-dripping blood in every way. Blood itself is indeed a character in this story.
The film Sweeney Todd is based on the 1979 musical by Stephen Sondheim, which itself draws inspiration from the character of Sweeney Todd, originally popularised in the 19th-century English penny dreadful The String of Pearls.
There are films where actors move through beautiful scenes and backdrops – scenes and backdrops that help the characters by embracing what is fertile in their acting, featuring the meaty substance in their expression that the audience craves. And the film is all too happy to give it to them.
Then there are films like Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, where the scenes, beautiful backdrops, and elemental elements are characters themselves. They bring to life, all on their own, what is truly vulnerable and virtuous in the story the film tells, revealing to the audience the deepest and darkest secrets that pump at the vital soul that is the heart of each character.
From the dark and shadowed rooms, scenes, corridors, and basements to the streets of Victorian London itself, everything unfolds like a never-ending graveyard. So much despair, and at the same time, such a wilful soul for life. A love of life. A love for life and the living soul of life.
This is portrayed beautifully in the main character, Sweeney Todd, played, of course, by Johnny Depp. A man transformed by loss, sadness, pain, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he suffers without his wife and the life taken from him. He is rescued by another chance, bringing him back to London, where it all started.
Having died to his former life as Benjamin Barker, now Sweeney Todd creates for himself a new life, resurrecting a new soul similar to the one that inhabits all of Victorian London. His new life is filled with new soul and passion for living, but it has become a soul of evil. And with every cell in his body, he will see that evil done.
Savouring the delicious, ripe, and gushing blossom his new fruit will bear, drinking every last drop of juice. Sweeney Todd celebrates each triumph, growing taller and taller each time into London’s new monster, revelling in every life he takes—until the last…
It is no accident that Depp as Todd looks like the walking dead – a cadaverous thing that hungers for life, shedding blood to brighten all the dark aspects of himself with life. But bathing in the blood of the murdered dead will not bring hope, nor does it bring a good life to Todd.
But it does bring Mrs Nellie Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter, another withered wraith turned craven dead who hungers for the living. She provides Todd with a gruesome arrangement filled with murder, cannibalism, and more blood.
Todd agrees, and the pair become partners in murder and mayhem. Lovett knows who Todd is and keeps him from his true love, out of some fractured sense of love she has for Todd. Kill after kill, the victims are sliced, chopped, and packed into meaty pies with a special thick gravy. The worst pies in London become the tastiest things on Fleet Street, while the black smoke from the chimney burns with the truth of death, telling a haunting story filled with all the horror that murder and blood can bring.
The barber, becoming entirely convinced he will never revive or reclaim any happiness of his former life, abandons all he is and embraces Sweeney Todd. The murderers slash their way through countless bodies – the film never tells the total body count – until finally, his moment comes.
Sweeney Todd gets Judge Turpin in the chair, played by Alan Rickman. Turpin gets everything that’s coming to him, but his death is bittersweet. As his wife and true love enters, not knowing who she is, other than the crazy soul outside the shop, Todd ends her life with the swipe of his straight razor. Immediately doing away with her like garbage, her body is sent down the chute and to the furnace.
Then comes the hardest part of the film for me to watch. Sweeney Todd instructs Mrs Lovett to open the furnace. With the light of the flame showing Lucy’s face, Todd realises it’s his wife lying there. He killed her. He destroyed the only thing he ever loved, and it was by his own hand. Then it is revealed that Mrs Lovett knew the whole time, keeping the knowledge from him, claiming she did it because she loved him. But if she truly loved him, she would have told him, seeing completely to his happiness.
For this, Todd does away with Mrs Lovett by throwing her into the furnace, feeding her to the flame. Todd returns to his wife, gently holding her body and reminiscing. While behind him, the final murder takes place. He is murdered by one of the innocent characters who survives the whole tale, Tobias Ragg, played by Ed Sanders. Tobias kills Sweeney Todd for all the evil he has done, his blood falling and spilling all over the face of the body of his true love. Sweeney Todd is still holding her while this happens.
The other innocents to survive the macabre murder tale are Anthony, played by Jamie Campbell Bower, who is the love interest for Johanna, played by Jayne Wisener. So no matter how evil or awful something is, it never takes away the strength of something good, of which the world has an overabundance. True love, happiness, and joy will always have an everlasting soul that is an ever-renewing source of love for life and the living soul of life.
In the end, that’s what Sweeney Todd is about: the living soul of true love. An interesting fact about Sweeney Todd himself is the streak of white in his hair. It is the last semblance of humanity and soul that he has left in him. Symbolism is truly a beloved and universal tool of storytelling – even if it’s covered in blood.
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Read about Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street from 1936!
