Sweeney Todd: The Movie, a Review

When Sweeney Todd debuted on Broadway in 1979, it riveted audiences with the seamy tale of a vengeful barber in early Victorian London who was bent on repaying the society in general and a certain Judge Turpin in particular for sending him off to 15 years of imprisonment in Australia on trumped-up charges while he, the judge, took Todd's wife and young daughter to fulfill his lusts. In fact, the name Sweeney Todd was only adopted by the barber on returning to England; he wanted to efface all memories of his earlier life while he embarked on his vengeful scheme. Todd the musical ran for more than 550 performances before closing in Summer 1980. Its superb cast, led by Angela Lansbury as the alternately scheming and understanding Mrs. Lovett, its macabre theme, and its exploration of the underbelly of a great Victorian city spewing its industrial guts hit a chord in the late 1970s, a chord that sounds remarkably off-key today as the movie version of the musical melodrama is released.

Indeed, even though Dreamworks, Inc. "hypes" its movies better than any other studio and seemingly has a bevy of fawning reviewers to eat the scraps that are thrown from the table, I don't think that the hype can save this monodimensional and philosophically weak work. This isn't to say that the themes explored in Todd are themselves unimportant; it is just that we as a society were much more willing to listen to them 25 years ago.

One Dimension

The movie is set in early Victorian London (probably about 1850). London is dark; London is gray; London is stratified; London is dull; London is bleak. Always. Everyone either is oppressed or has his foot on the neck of someone to oppress him. Boys are whipped; asylums are full of screaming and fearful people. Vermin crawl everywhere--in the sewers, in the bakery shop, in the breaded pies. Human inhumanity isn't even covered over by much of a veneer of cultivation or culture. There you have it. London.

Then, you have young man, a barber, with a beautiful wife and daughter, who is sent away to Australia for years on trumped-up charges, so that the Judge Turpin (another yawningly-predictable character) can vent his lusts without any possibility of reprisal. This naturally creates the desire for revenge in the returning barber. Actually, there is here the germ of a very interesting idea, because a returning shipmate of the now middle-aged Todd is a young man who eventually falls in love with Todd's daughter, a teen-aged girl who is being kept like a bird in a cage by Turpin. But because the movie is more of a musical that a movie, ideas cannot be developod well or thoroughly, and we have to remain at the level of the 1979 Broadway tunes. I don't think the two media (Broadway/modern movie) mix very well. But, returning to the movie, Todd sets up his barber shop as a means of avenging himself on the world [the first victim of his throat-slitting exploits is none other than Sasha Baron Cohen, who has given up his Borat role to place a minor but actually excellently-played role as rival barber/extorter in this movie], and the monodimensional movie proceeds, this time with the body parts of Todd's victims being used as "meat pies" to promote Mrs. Lovett's business. Ultimately the vengeance gets out of control, and Todd becomes a victim to the rage which seemed so effective at wiping out large swaths of the middle-aged male population of London. Yet, the film can't really explore the emotions felt by Todd, especially during the final "recognition" scene, when he realizes that one of his victims is none other than his wife of long ago--now reduced to a begging and unkempt harridan. The movie is flat, and the music, though sometimes lyrical and beautiful, cannot redeem its monodimensional simplicity.

Philosophical Weakness

There was an idea floating around in American society at the end of the 1970s that had the curious effect of launching the public careers of E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist, and Sweeney Todd. Simply put, it was the triumph of a biological basis of behavior, a sort of modern-day determinism that Wilson spoke of in his 1975 Sociobiology. And the 1979 Sweeney Todd fits into that mold perfectly. Lust drives Judge Turpin. He acts to obtain the object of his lust. Thus, he has to remove the barber from the scene. He does so. Fifteen years later, the barber returns. He has to avenge the rape of wife and carrying off of daughter. Simple as that. We are controlled and driven by forces beyond our control. Biology propels us; Lust drives us; power impels; rage and vengefulness have to be the result. And so we have a movie with creatures who are really determined or destined by the pull of forces deep within them to play roles that act out those forces. There is no such thing as freedom here; no nobility of human action; no desire to "better oneself" or to "realize" the self. All there is is acting on human impulse, impulses that are embedded into the core of our character.

That idea "worked" in 1979, but it doesn't work too well in 2007/08. Though we still believe that people are driven by lusts and deep desires and that vengeance is an understandable reaction to long years of mistreatment and injustice, America has gone through an "idea-change" in the past generation that questions the inevitability of it all--which is the ideological basis of Sweeney Todd. For today, even though we may be deceived in the belief, we believe in "breaking the cycle of violence," in "stopping the oppression at this generation," in the power of forgiveness (at least we give lip-service to the concept), in the possiblities of a new chance for people. Sweeney Todd the movie won't go over very well because it basically assumes a philosophy that we no longer adopt for ourselves. We understand the vengeance, and we maybe even sympathize with some of it. We hope that Turpin and his rascally beadle are the victims of the knife. But we long for the exploration of complexity in the midst of this simplicity. We want to see romance develop; we want nuance; and even if these don't come we want to see some kind of character development or problematic condundrum in relationships that allows us to imagine how things might work out. But, we are not give that here. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the 'musical' format that is to blame. But, in fact, it may just be that Sweeney Todd is a generation too late. Let's keep it in 1979, where it belongs.

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