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| Friday, December 28, 2007 06:01 PM |
| On the Viewer: Sweeney Todd |
 by Fëanor |
This is, sadly, not the recently released film adaptation of the musical, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp. No, it's a non-musical 2006 BBC TV movie production of the story starring Ray Winstone as the title character, David Warner as a blind police chief named Sir John Fielding, David Bradley (Filch from the Harry Potter movies) as Todd's father, and Essie Davis as Mrs. Lovett. I believe it was the cast that enticed me into putting this on the Netflix queue. And indeed the cast is good and performs well, the movie is well-filmed and looks great, and the soundtrack is rather effective. The problem is, they've stripped away all the complexity and everything else that I liked about this story as it's told in the musical, and added in some really creepy and gross psycho-sexual issues that almost made me stop watching about half way through.
In this version of the story, Sweeney does not go to sea, come back to London with a young man whose life he's saved, and then set up as a barber. Instead, the film starts with Sweeney as a barber in London. He's successful now, but he spent many years in Newgate Prison, having essentially taken the rap for a crime committed by his father. And he's not seeking revenge against anybody, not even his father or the men at the prison. There is a young man in the story whose life Sweeney saves, but he's just a cop that Sweeney takes a bullet out of, and there's no love story subplot with the boy and Sweeney's daughter - Sweeney doesn't even have a daughter. He kills people seemingly randomly at first, for no particular reason (although later he kills to preserve the secret of his earlier crimes), except that it may provide him with some sexual release - that's not entirely clear, although it is clear that Sweeney is unable to have normal sexual relations with a woman. Mrs. Lovett doesn't know him from long ago; he meets her when she comes seeking an abortion, and falls for her. He does end up killing people and giving Lovett the meat to put in her pies, but she doesn't know where the meat comes from, and when he does eventually tell her, she's pretty freaked out. Also, the killings at this point take on a sick new dimension; Mrs. Lovett makes love to men she meets at the shop while, unknown to her, Sweeney looks on; she recommends Sweeney's barber shop to them and he (again unknown to her) kills them, and gives her their flesh to put in pies.
Basically, it's more disgusting, but less interesting. The whole revenge storyline, Sweeney's obsession with the past to the point of overlooking the present, the social commentary and satire, the black humor, the great songs, the love story and the way it's contrasted and interwoven with Sweeney's story - all of that is gone. Instead we just get the story of a pretty pathetic and disgusting man who's been twisted by having spent a large part of his life in prison. Disappointing. |
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