The bloodiest movie I've ever enjoyed

[amethyst73]

The huz and I just got back from watching the Sweeney Todd movie.  For the most part, we were quite pleased with it.

As most folks know, Tim Burton and associated folks decided not to have actors specifically known for their singing in the movie.  This might initially sound like a bad idea since, well, it's a movie of a musical, and there's a lot of singing going on.  Fortunately, that choice worked out quite well, really.  Nobody has an amazing voice, but that's okay because they'd sound incredibly out of place if they did.  On the other hand, nobody has a really good classically trained voice either.  But again, that's mostly okay.  Johnny Depp (Todd) brings a great conviction to most of his singing, and his rock style of delivery works very well for his deeply disturbed and lower-class character.  Jayne Wisener (Johanna) was a very pleasant surprise: she's got what's going to be an extremely pretty coloratura voice if she chooses to train it, and I sincerely hope she does.  I think that young Ed Sanders (Toby) has probably had some voice lessons - I don't think he'd have done nearly so well on "Nothin's gonna harm you" without them - but his young voice fits in just fine with the relatively untrained adult voices around him.  The one disappointment for me on the vocal front was Helena Bonham-Carter (Mrs. Lovett).  Her voice sounded wispy and thin, not at all in keeping with what I've always seen as an exceptionally strong female character.  Her singing also happens to sound exactly like the sort of unsupported singing my voice teacher helps people fix, so I'm distinctly biased here!  The other leads were all at least fine vocally.

Looks: I was impressed again by Jayne Wisener here.  I don't know quite how the costume and makeup people managed to make her into a living doll, but they did.  Coupled with a general lack of decisive actions (differing from the stage play), her appearance makes it perfectly clear that she's a prize to be won.  Jamie Campbell Bower (Anthony) struck me as a living bishounen (I'd only seen anime versions before).  The first time he appeared, my first thought was, quite seriously, "Er, which gender is that.. person?"  And my second thought (as soon as he opened his mouth and sang, thus identifying the role he was playing) was that he was, in the words of Mercedes Lackey, quite as beautiful as a girl.  Whoa.  Depp's costume, wig, and makeup served well to enhance the image of someone who's a little disturbed and more than a little bit of an outsider.  Again, this fitted well with the rock voice that Depp used for his singing.  The wig also went nicely with the black-and-white striped bathing suit he wears during one of the "By the Sea" visuals.  I suppose it was appropriate for Mrs. Lovett's hair/makeup/costume to be similarly overdone, but I felt it didn't work quite as well.  The film as a whole was appropriately dim for most of it, though it didn't hit me over the head with "It's DARK, get it??" the same way that the Potter/Phoenix film did, which is fine.  I liked the soft sepia photograph quality that was used during "Nothin's gonna harm you," reminding the viewer of an old photograph.

Oh yes, and if one's going to talk about visuals in this film, one kind of has to discuss the blood.  I am not and have never been a slasher movie fan, so I don't have much basis for comparison here.  I thought the opening credits visuals were extremely well done, moving from simple rain, to rain with the occasional scarlet drop, to rivers of the stuff flowing through interlocking gears (referencing a mechanization-is-evil subtext that was plain in the original show but was otherwise untouched in the film) and into the sewers.  As a biologist, I must admit to being curious as to whether, if a throat is slashed, that much stuff really spurts out in that particular manner.  Did the movie folks do tests to get it realistic?  (If so... on what?)  Or were the amounts of blood overdone?  I found it interesting that when the Old Woman's throat is cut, instead of spurting, her throat instead releases a waterfall of the stuff running down her skin in a red curtain.  When Todd meets his end, his throat similarly weeps blood rather than spurting.  And it goes on bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding as the screen fades to black and the end credits roll.

I noticed a little late in the film that there's a different camera angle with every throat slice, and I would guess that Depp's ..technique (for lack of a better term) was a bit different for each one as well.

 

Some favorite bits: Todd baring the 'hilt' of his razor in the street when he sees Beadle Bamford and Mrs. Lovett immediately but subtly restraining him from taking action.  Judge Turpin's sentencing of a workhouse boy to hanging and Alan Rickman's awesomeness in not overacting the part.  Todd constructing his special chair.  The total surreality of the "By the Sea" sequence.  The wisdom of Johanna ("The nightmares never go away") contrasted with Anthony's cluelessness ("Our [good] dreams will come true now").  Toby's apparent sanity at the end (and the similarity in eye makeup between him at that point and Todd's all along).

General impressions: If I hadn't been so completely familiar with the story going into the theater, I'm certain I would have been considerably shell-shocked by it.  It's such an incredibly violent story, and most of the surviving characters are so clearly going to need serious therapy for the next several years, that an uninformed viewer could hardly help being walloped by it.

Comments

[orewashinanai.livejournal.com]

The term bishounen hadn't occurred to me when I was thinking similar thoughts about Anthony's gender ambiguity, but THAT'S SO TRUE!

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

I actually disagree with your conclusion on Carter's voice, though I agree with the constituent parts: there were only a couple of places where it actively grated on me, and the rest of the time I felt it worked pretty well for the character. As played in the movie, at least, she's not a particularly strong character, and furthermore is poor, undernourished, and generally a thin sort of person. From that perspective, I thought the thin, unsupported voice worked pretty well (aside from a couple terrible high notes, that is).

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

You're right, and it really only occurred to me later that she *wasn't* a strong character in the movie. She's beaten down and tired, and only starts finding energy when she and Todd enter into their little partnership.

I think the thing that really got me was that her tone didn't have a 'core' to it, whereas everyone else's did; thus her voice kind of stood out to my ears.