The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

“Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd”—Literally

January 23rd, 2008

Because it’s good, even if it does not include a sung version of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (from the original Broadway show, quoted above).

How pleased I was yesterday when Johnny Depp received a Best Leading Actor Oscar nomination yesterday for Sweeney Todd. He does extremely well in his first singing role, and if his voice isn’t exactly pleasant to listen to—well, that’s how it should be. Speaking of which, the classical music critic for the New York Times has written an article saying that opera singers could learn a lot from Depp’s portrayal of Todd—specifically, they could learn how to act and to invest the words they sing with meaning. I get his point, and I think Depp’s acting/singing here is indeed to be commended, but I’m surprised that the critic doesn’t seem to consider that Depp is singing Sondheim. Sondheim, who has been parodied in a number called “Into the Words.” His melodies exist for the cleverness of the words, while opera . . . well, let’s just say I’ve never run across a particularly thought-inspiring operatic line in any language.

Speaking of music, I had a hard time pinning down exactly what I liked so much about Tim Burton’s film until I heard an interview with Stephen Sondheim. Yeah, I know people like Tim Burton for his visual creations, but, as I mention from time to time, I’m woefully inadequate at noticing stuff like “Art Direction” (for which Sweeney received another Oscar nomination). But Sondheim hit the nail on the head when he said, “He’s very musical, and he’s filmed it to the music. . . . He is responding visually to what he hears aurally. You can see it in the rhythm, the way the camera glides, the way it moves, the choice of angles. It just goes—forgive me—straight for the jugular.”

Yes! That’s it! And that’s what someone like me, who’s much more tuned in to the aural than to the visual, can appreciate. I’m not sure how much of that is due to the cinematographer and how much is due to Burton, but it works. Now that I think about it, that sense of phrasing in the camera work may actually be what has been missing from so many recent film adaptations of stage musicals.

I know many people will probably be asking (as I was before going to see it), “So just how violent is it?” Well, it’s a classic revenge tragedy, so there’s lots of death and blood. You do see many throats slit on screen, but the way it’s filmed made us cringe and look away and then giggle, as opposed to, say, cringing and looking away and being traumatized for the rest of our lives. If you’re an optimist about human nature, you probably won’t want to see it. I think this is the sort of film that makes my latent Calvinist come out, though, like when Todd sings, “We all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I.” Plus, as a vegetarian, I find the theme of cannibalism amusing.

My one problem with the movie is that we don’t get observers to the revenge-tableau at the end. You know, like in Hamlet, where Horatio, the one sort of normal person in the play, comes in and observes all the dead bodies on the ground and shakes his head and clucks but somehow lets the audience know that things will be a little more peaceful now? Well, we didn’t get that in Sweeney Todd, even though there were characters perfectly well suited to filling that role—and Wikipedia tells me that these characters do come in and observe the carnage at the end of the stage play. So why did Burton leave it out? It left me with a sense of incompleteness. I can understand wanting to disrupt the genre conventions a little bit, but why observe them faithfully throughout the movie and then chuck them out the window at the end?

Anyway, that’s a fairly minor gripe, but because it’s at the end, it did affect the movie’s aftertaste for me. Here’s the bottom line: if you too have an inner Calvinist that doesn’t get out much, then, by all means, treat it to a day at the movies with Sweeney Todd!

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