A little night music with lots of blood

Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has the wrong title. It should be There Will Be Blood Too. Actually TWBB and ST are both worthy films, it’s just that Sweeney Todd, a film that aims high and gets there easily, opens the dam gates to the flow of red in a manner that will appeal to the Saw crowd even while unreeling in a fashion beholden to serious musical theater.
The blood is plentiful, sticky and velvet textured, thick and bright in hue. The flow is copious, yet there are interludes between the violence that transform the experience from one of Tim Burtonesque Grand Guignol to the sublime sweetness of Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics.
The 1979 Broadway play Sweeney Todd is considered a benchmark among musicals, and it’s not hard to become a believer in Sondheim when you’ve taken the journey into his world of eerie harmonies and complicated orchestration. Combine Burton’s similarly frightening vision and the at times midnight blue monochromatic color scheme (Imagine black and white where black is blue highlighted with the occasional blood stain.) and the entire film becomes a spectacle to behold with wonder. Two scenes that take place in pure sunlight are in such contrast that the brightness makes you squint.
Pacing the story so that the first blood doesn’t appear until about the end of the second reel the duo of the macabre and the melodies are like opposites that attract. The second wave of killings dispatches five victims during one song. That’s followed by a lull in the violence only to be outdone by the final deaths of the main characters, each one more vividly resplendent in tone.
Johnny Depp toplines along with Helena Bonham Carter and both talk sing their songs in character. Ditto with Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman, as devious a couple of public officials that ever dealt harsh judgment. Newbie Jamie Campbell Bower plays a lad who gets to warble the best song “Johanna.” Fans of legit fare won’t mind the judicious cutting of some of the play’s songs.