'Sweeney Todd'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

December 21, 2007

The blood gushes like a burst water main and spritzes smack into the camera lens.

Should we expect anything less from "Sweeney Todd" in the hands of Tim Burton, the demon prankster of Hollywood Boulevard? Hardly. The pressing question from devotees of Stephen Sondheim's landmark Broadway musical is: Does the score surge forth with commensurate power?

Yes, Virginia, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" really is a musical, despite the squeamish efforts of DreamWorks marketing wizards to suppress that dirty little secret until the final moments of the previews.

Where the operatically sumptuous stage original reached for the vocal cords, however, Burton's slash-happy screen version goes for the jugular. Hewing close to Hugh Wheeler's 1979 libretto, screenwriter John Logan amps up the full-on brutality of a Victorian-age barber (Johnny Depp, tressed like the love child of Edward Scissorhands and Susan Sontag) who returns to London after years of wrongful incarceration to wreak revenge on the judge who ruined his life (Alan Rickman).

In cahoots with the adoring Mrs. Lovett, a meat-pie baker running low on ingredients (Helena Bonham Carter), the embittered barber takes out his wrath on the city's shave-needy male populace.

The film's second half is a veritable master class in throat-slitting legerdemain; as captured with anatomical relish by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, screen horror has rarely seemed so rapturously gruesome.

"Sweeney Todd" is purportedly Burton's favorite musical, and he approaches it with reverence (notwithstanding the dumbfounding excision of the indelible "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" lyric). Sondheim was recruited to oversee the score and greenlight the cast, which mixes familiar British faces (a wicked-funny Sacha Baron Cohen as the flim-flamming Signor Pirelli) with first-timers (Ed Sanders is a real find as Pirelli's abused assistant Toby). Sondheim's longtime musical director Paul Gemigniani was also elected to conduct; the enhanced orchestrations are a dream.

Abetted by Wolski's swooping, receding camera and Jonathan Tunick's propulsive orchestrations, Burton makes this as fluid and dynamic as any screen ride this year, musical or otherwise. Where stage versions (encouraged by Angela Lansbury's antic Mrs. Lovett in the original) have played up the grotesquely comic contrast between the lyrical music and the murderous doings, Burton goes at the material with dead earnestness. He ghouls up his two leads with chalk-white faces and charcoal eyes; Depp and Bonham Carter stagger about with monochromatic scowls that are the common mask of the living dead and the world of high fashion.

The truly enduring fright of this "Sweeney Todd" is the noise that comes out of his two stars whenever they open their mouths to sing. Burton was determined to cast actors who could conquer a tune rather than singers who could simulate a performance; the problem with a score as complex and nuanced as this is thatit depends for its dramatic and comic potency on vocal brio. When "Pretty Women" should soar, it sits; where "A Little Priest" should bubble, it blands out.

As the flaccid Sondheim covers piled up with the body count, Ithought of David Cronenberg's defense of graphic screen violence. "If you're going to kill someone [on film]," he said on National Public Radio in September, commenting on the uniqueness of every life, "it should mean something. And it should mean something to the audience." Burton succeeds in making each death matter. If he could have done as much for the music, he would have had a "Sweeney Todd" for the ages.

SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (R). That bloody Sondheim musical, the Tim Burton way. A bountiful eyeful and earful, if lacking in the vocalese and final wallop of the Broadway original. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter star. 2:00 (graphic violence). At area theaters.