SWEENEY


Let me be quite clear about it: I adore this musical. I don’t think there’s a stage-musical written in the last fifty years which can match it. A timeless revenge drama, a world-view shocking in its bleakness – and yet every character in it pulses with vivid life, and love often struggles to flourish amid the treachery. The script (based on a play by Christopher Bond) is a finely-honed mechanism, but the addition of the music lifts it to a higher plane. Just the thrilling opening number is worth the price of admission, and from there the score opens up to reveal Sondheim’s remarkable versatility: lush melodies, shrieking atonalism, patter arias, darkly raucous music-hall numbers and heartfelt cries of anguish.

Now, I’m aware the above paragraph may be preaching to the converted, but my point is that when you have a score this awesome, you celebrate it. Or at least, I would.

I certainly wouldn’t eviscerate said score, chop out some of the most stirring musical passages and give the remainder to a cast that largely couldn’t sing.

This cavalier attitude to the singing – hey, we can’t have Johnny Depp dubbed by a trained singer because it might hurt his feelings! – has been the reason I’ve avoided the film until this point. Now, having finally given the film a chance, I’m delighted to report that every single one of my prejudices was bang on the money. Just like Gerard “PHANTOM” Butler before him, Depp takes a pleasant-sounding score and turns it into something to which it is painful to listen. Bonham-Carter fares considerably better in most of her songs, but her frail pure thread of a voice can’t cope with the boisterous energy of her opening number, “The Worst Pies In London”. The result just serves to underline the sort of singer who should have landed the part.

If you can’t understand why I’m so upset, just try to imagine a modern version of WEST SIDE STORY where Depp and Bonham-Carter took the main roles and weren’t dubbed by trained singers. Just imagine their wafer-thin tones attempting classics like “Tonight” and “Maria”. Even if you had never heard the score before and didn’t have the classic 1961 version with which to compare it, you’d be subtly aware that you were being short-changed, wouldn’t you? You’d just know that music this glorious deserved something better than a mediocre performance.

Actually, maybe that’s why some of the lushest sections of the score got axed? There’s a lovely middle passage of “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” which got the chop, seemingly for no other reason than to save space. The “Kiss Me/Ladies in their Sensitivities” quartet, in particular the section starting with “The name is Todd” (starting at 4:08 on the linked excerpt) is often glorious. And, because Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall can only just carry a tune and certainly couldn’t cope with the demands of that piece, out it went - and with it went much of the generally-adorable character of Anthony and Johanna, too. From a rich, full-blooded portrait of Victorian society, this SWEENEY got shrivelled down to a thin, black-and-white engraving of Sweeney, Mrs Lovett and not much else.

Which, in turn, might not have been so bad if Johnny Depp had shown a bit more emotion in what was supposed to be a melodrama. But he didn’t. Just look at the way he delivers “Would no-one have mercy on her?”: it’s a line which should break with the weight of his emotional reaction – he has, after all, just been told of the public gang-rape of his wife - and there he is, screaming “NOOOO!” on cue, yet immediately following it up with a hoarse, withdrawn mutter. “Would no-one (pause) ‘ave mercy on ‘er?” This version of Sweeney has so much self-control that he lets his façade slip for no more than a second before switching back to the role of interested stranger. This Sweeney is so icy that he issues the follow-up questions “Where’s Lucy? Where’s my wife?” in a lifeless monotone, as if he doesn’t really care what answer he gets. For me, that severely lessens the tragic impact of the character – other stage Sweeneys I’ve seen have shown the vulnerability of that moment, not rejected it in favour of a stony demeanour. This Sweeney is a man who’d decided to take the path of revenge and become a killer before he’d even stepped off the ship. “Benjamin Barker”, the loving husband and father, the man with a hope of redemption, died long before this film’s opening credits.

Nellie Lovett – well, of course I found it hard to get over Helena Bonham-Carter’s porcelain-doll beauty! Expecting us to believe she’s a work-coarsened shopkeeper is like a supermodel putting on a ragged dress and expecting us to believe she’s Brecht’s “Mother Courage”! That said, she was perfectly watchable in the role, and I particularly enjoyed her glances of hopeless adoration in Sweeney’s direction. Rickman (Judge Turpin) and Spall (Beadle Bamford), the other celebrities in the film, were adequate at best: the relative unknowns playing Anthony, Johanna and the Beggar-woman were clearly talented, but had their roles shrunk almost to cameos. At least the scarily young Ed Sanders (Toby) was given the space to demonstrate his excellent vocal technique: his rendition of “Not While I’m Around” was possibly my favourite scene in the film.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I didn’t enjoy much else about this version. Tim Burton’s capable of some great visuals, but the morbid humour leant too far to the “sick” end of the scale in this one. (Were we supposed to laugh at the spectacle of a ten-year-old being sentenced to hang? Or Toby telling us about the “things that happen in the dark” in the workhouse? Yes, Tim, child molestation is just the thing to use for a throwaway gag.) In addition, whenever the scriptwriters changed things, it was nearly always for the worse. Judge Turpin’s invitation to Anthony to come up and see his porn collection** was a very poor exchange for the Beadle’s “songbird” scene (“Get the picture, friend? Next time, it will be your neck”). Besides, who could possibly prefer the line “I’ll be right back to you – half an hour and we’ll be free!” to the original “I’ll be back before those lips have time to lose that smile”?

And as for the ending – could there be any clearer evidence that everyone got fed up and decided to wrap it up without thought for plot or character resolution? “Who cares that we don’t know what happened to Toby, Johanna or Anthony? You know what happened to the principals. Go home; that’s all folks.”

All in all, a waste of awesome material. I just hope it doesn’t put people off Sondheim.


** In addition, the terrible dialogue in that added scene (“You gandered, sir, you gandered, you gandered!”) also provoked the irreverent thought that this must be some private contest by the scriptwriters to insert the names of foreign countries into the script. Since “Tibet” and “Peru” were mentioned in the opening song, I spent the next forty minutes on the lookout for cunning references to “Sam Mower” or “Vinnie’s whaler”. Maybe they tried and got found out? Shame, as in my view a “hidden countries contest” would have improved the script by about 70%.

EDIT, 25/08/08: Just found a review which goes more deeply into the defects of the Burton version. Reading it, I had that rare sensation of being in total agreement with every single point the critic makes:

http://mslaurylsulfate.livejournal.com/593.html