Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) is a revenge drama, in the tradition of Hamlet or one of the 18^th-century Jacobean revenge plays. A barber named Benjamin Barker is falsely sent to prison by a corrupt judge who then seduces or even rapes the barber's wife. She dies of humiliation or a broken heart, and her infant daughter is adopted by the evil judge. On release from prison fifteen years later, Barker vows revenge and changes his name to Sweeney Todd.

Sweeney Todd is full of hatred and bitterness, fueled by anguish and heartbreak over all that has happened to him. When he discovers that he maty have difficulty exacting revenge against the judge, he decides to seek revenge against the whole human race. The musical includes tender love songs and romantic ballads, some of them sung as we watch Todd slitting the throats of his customers and dumping them down a chute to a basement furnace room where his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who has fallen in love with the barber, butchers the corpses and bakes them into meat pies that she sells to the general public. The film's underlying and ever-present irony subverts the romanticism of the songs and the self-pity of the main characters.

This film, based on the famous 1979 Broadway play with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, itself based on a long tradition of literary and folk sources, has a strongly allegorical quality. It is a commentary on modern times, on our penchant for violence (both in the entertainment we prefer and in our foreign policy) and our romantic self-infatuations. Sweeney is if anything a romantic, and he pines for his lost wife, but he is also a narcissist. He believes his own suffering and grief justify the brutal acts of murder he commits on his customers.

In several scenes, we see from afar black columns of smoke issuing from the chimneys of the building where Sweeney barbers and butchers his customers, and where their bodies burn in the oven that cooks the meat pies. For me, the black smoke suggested the smoke from the crematoria in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other infamous locations of World War II.

In another sense the play and film are a parable about capitalism, about how we feed our dreams on the corpses of those we exploit. Sweeney's dream is the desire to murder the man who destroyed his family. More generally, his dream is to get revenge on the general human race—his general statement about the unfairness of the lot he has been dealt. His accomplice Mrs. Lovett apparently has a similar self-justification—she's been done wrong by various unnamed parties, probably men. Moreover, she loves Sweeney and seeks to do whatever will make him happy.

This story offers the symmetry of Greek myth—of the tale of Medea who for revenge kills her own children and feeds them to her husband, or of Atreus, who feeds to his brother his own sons. There is a moment if recognition in both these mythic narratives, when the horrified parent recognizes the nature of the meal he is about to consume—there is a similar moment in Sweeney Todd, though of a somewhat different sort that brings justice to bear on Sweeney.

There's little pleasure in watching this film. The music is good. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are effective. Depp throws himself fully into his role. But you're never free of the gnawing certainty that his story is not a normal or representative one. Whatever allegorical or political implications it might have, it's a tale of a man driven mad by grief, of a psychotic serial killer. One could argue that society drives him to do what he does—that a corrupt judge and judicial system falsely accuse and imprison him, that a perfidious judge is allowed to ruin a young woman and adopt her daughter without repercussions. Yes, no doubt, society is replete with corruption and evil that victimize the helpless and innocent. Yet such realities do not justify or mitigate what Sweeney Todd does and becomes. He's more distorted, perverted, corrupt, and hollow to the core than anyone else in the film, including the judge whom he hates to the end.

When Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett come to their inevitable bitter conclusions, there's no satisfaction for the viewer. We knew this was coming all along, and for me it could have come sooner. This is no tragedy. We never identify with Sweeney, at least not with the man he becomes—there's nothing to like about him once he starts slitting throats.

The film's somber brooding tone is characteristic of its director Tim Burton. Though the it is shot in color, shades of grey, black, and white predominate. The film brims with Hogarthian caricatures, distorted and grotesque human faces that somehow typify the city that the film portrays. The story of Sweeney Todd gives Burton the chance to revel in his favorite elements.

Sweeney Todd as a film (and presumably a play—I haven't seen it as a play) is a sordid spectacle that titillates its audience with beautiful music and with love and violence and spurting fountains of blood—the blood and the gore undercut and fundamentally subvert any real message the film might be seeking to deliver. The ironic turn of events at the end of the play only emphasizes the extremity of Sweeney's dissolution.