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They were the ones who knew that underneath the decency, the manners, the calm and order of everyday society lurked something diabolical- an ugly past, a fiendish urge, undying grudges and a freaky boilpot of guilt and fear. Hark that thudding heart of the dead, the bottomless hypnotic pit in the eyes of the snake who isn’t there, a creeping shadow of whose only footsteps are heard by night and by day all that remains is a trail of innocent… and not so innocent blood. Poe, Bierce, Hoffman, Le Fanu, Lovecraft, Stoker and the likes, masters all, they chronicled the deviance and deceit in the darkness and behind closed and respectable doors, doors that opened to hell itself where you may expect to find a bearded red scaled fiend but instead realized that the evil grin that starred back chilling you to the bones was none other than one’s own. After all hell is a private matter. To each his own

They were masters of the macabre, concocters of tales, true and untrue that courted scandal and undying fascination. Their purloined yellow pages have smeared their print on all forms of literature, from dime pulp to textbook psychology. They have given the world the mad scientist, the errant robot/monster, the deadbeat detective among other Goths lined up against the wall in an opium den, in forms that we now recognize. It was a glorious time, so Tim Burton would remark. Sure there are other bearers of their hellflame but none as anachronistic as Burton. He mourns for his cinematic predecessors and tributes them Jacques Tourneur, James Whale, Andre De Toth, Roger Corman frequently employing the actors once associated with them in tailored parts. The likes of Stephen King and George Romero strive for a contemporary take but with Burton, there is melancholy, nostalgia for a time he has never seen but pines for like a dark prince alone in a doomed castle. Not for nothing has he been remarked of as having sympathies for the ‘freaks’- The incomplete humanoid of ‘Edward Scissorhands’, the uncommunicative gothic teenage girl of ‘Beetlejuice’, the raggedly citizens of Halloweentown in ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, the worst director in the history of cinema in ‘Ed Wood’ and of course that pop culture icon of brooding loneliness and inner turmoil- Batman. Unlike simplistic tales of the Shrek kind where the movie seems to be almost apologetic about the lead character being a hideous misfit, Burton celebrates the freakishness, delights in the grotesquerie and most importantly, knows that it is unique, it is special. His sadness is only in that the rest of the world should fail to recognize it as such.

The other common factor of Burton’s best work is the landscape. What his upper echelon of films share is a gothic sprawl as timeless as in the B-films and comics of Burton’s childhood only supersized to epic proportions. To understand this one can compare the first Batman with its sequel Batman Returns. During the making of the first film Burton’s vision was in constant negotiation with the studio it being the event film of the summer. From the Prince Soundtrack down, it is evident it is an unmistable late 80s film and some 20 years later time has taken away a bit of the charm. But with the success of Batman, Burton was conferred with more freedom on its sequel. With freakish flourishes he conjures up Gotham city as a haunted kindergarten where penguins with missiles strapped to their back paddle their way to execute doomsday.

Burton’s decadent vision which attained screwball absurdity with Martian invasion saga “Mars Attacks!” suffered a minor setback after the biggest folly of his career put Mark Wahlberg and a chimp in a spaceship headed for ‘The Planet of the Apes and a barely clad Estella Warren’. He regained some ground in the surprisingly sunny ‘Big Fish’ and then some more with ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and the animated feature ‘Corspe Bride’ but where was the menace, the vitality, the horror, the scandal, the dark gift of the masters of the macabre that once seemed to possess him? In his latest feature, ‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ he finds it locked away below the floorboards of a rundown pie shop in Fleet Street, London. As Burton’s alter-ego, actor Johnny Depp playing the titular demon barber unsheathes shiny silver razors singing to it in murderous tones, holding it against the window, declares aloud, “And now my right hand is complete”, any doubts you harbor will be shredded to pieces, throats will be sliced, blood will flow, bodies will fall, there will be mayhem like the devil is in town.

Burton sets tone right from the rain-meat-blood-iron-hell’s-kitchen opening credits as atonal, ominous funereal music accompanies a vertiginous CGI sequence of meat processing. Typical of him, there is something playful about what can otherwise be a stomach-churning chore. It’s the mischief of the masters who wrote not blunt sequences of gore and violence but with sharp delicious wit. In Burton’s own oeuvre it was last glimpsed in the bloody fairytale ‘Sleepy Hollow’. A shadow of a ship enters port in 19th century London town. A young blonde sailor on board sings a song of hope and wholesomeness on the city but is quickly interrupted by a man most strange. Deathly pallor in the face that extends in an eerie streak across the hair and eyelids burning deep amber like a blood clot. He sings of vermin, of dirt, of people full of shit, voice aquiver with fury. 15 years ago he was a happy man, a well-to-do barber with a beautiful and virtuous wife and a daughter of their own. That was before the nefarious Judge Turpin and his consort the swine-like Beadle Bamford conspired to damn him to a prison across the oceans so that the judge may woo the wife. 15 years he has been away caged, 15 years he has been nourishing vengeance. He sees London as a city of ghosts and shadows and he should know, he is but like a ghost of the barber Benjamin Barker now called ‘Sweeney Todd’.

He visits his old house on Fleet Streets and finds it occupied by Mrs. Lovett (Burton’s muse, the drop-dead-delirious Ms. Helena Bonham Carter), a lonely widow who makes the worst meat pies in town and who’s husband seemingly died by stuffing himself up to ‘bloatation’. She informs him of his wife’s rape and subsequent death at the hands of the ’repectable’ judge. Mrs. Lovett who shares Sweeney’s loneliness and pallor finds in him a fellow lost soul and offers him the loft above where he finds the instruments of his trade and now, his means to vengeance. Here Burton orchestrates an emotionally layered scene. Sweeney sings “My Friend” to his razors his eyes staring back into his own blurred ghostly reflection while Mrs. Lovett sings the song to Sweeney. They sing disparately each lost in their own thoughts but join each other as the stanzas rise to a crescendo. This is followed by a visit to the marketplace where Sweeney can size up his competition, Adolfo Pirelli, barber to the courts of Italy, played by Sacha Baron Cohen who can officially tick off Italian barber in his checklist of cultural stereotypes. This scene also marks the debut of the sensational lil Ed Sanders playing Toby, a street-smart kid, an Artful Dodger of sorts who ran away from the orphanage to end up helping Pirelli ply his trade. Emoting seamlessly as he tries to sing his way trying to pass bottles of piss and ink as hair tonic, he is pure delight.

Oh yes and I forget to mention but it’s quite a known fact now that ‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ is 90% sung. But not only is it a rare musical where you can actually enjoy the songs without the context of the film, Burton turns the melodious texture of the film into a wholly original aesthetic. Employing Stephen Sondheim’s beloved songs and score, he orchestrates the proceedings into an epic ballad. With slightly eccentric and stylized performances from the actors, the out-of-this-world Oscar winning art design by Dante Ferreti and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s fluent camera work as it weaves in and out of the absurd characters and set-pieces with the soundtrack, Burton dispels any inertness or constrictions that might remind one that it is an adaptation of a play or even that it is sung.

Standout sequences include Sweeney preparing to shave the unsuspecting Judge Turpin as both of them sing the terrific ‘Pretty Women’. The swell of the music, the ominous motions of Sweeney’s razor and the judge sitting neck wide exposed, his thoughts far away as he dreams of marrying his ward Johanna who also happens to be Sweeney’s daughter. Delicious! In a dream sequence in ‘Epiphany’ Johnny Depp is devious as he slithers around like an angry snake hissing to prospective customers with a grin of joy and malice that, ”Sweeney’s waiting.” If one can think clearly through the strangely hypnotic montage of love, yearning and mass murder set to ‘Johanna’, you’ll see that under the epic excess of the movie lies a terrific and potent slasher film. But the moment of high delirium is when Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett conspire on how to get rid of the first victim clean. “Can you hear that crunching sound outside,” says Sweeney,” That’s man devouring man.” Mrs. Lovett playfully pops a pie from the oven to the table and asks,” How about a priest?” Sweeney’s not particularly keen. “Call me when there’s judge on the menu,” he retorts as they sing song of all the various and luscious meats that human flesh can provide. A fiendish celebration and a sharp critique of progress and modernity showing a rare moment of misogyny from the otherwise playful Burton. Another dark and deceptive moment occurs when Mrs. Lovett fantasizes a sugar-plum future of houses on beaches and marriage and friends. The eternal fog over the skies is momentarily lifted but the irony of the scene, conveyed with pitch black humor, is evident. There is not going to be a happy ending.

A minor subplot involving the young blonde sailor and Sweeney’s daughter Johanna almost slips from notice but Burton’s unabashed romanticism makes it worth reminiscing. He has crafted an infectious film, a giddily flamboyant ride and taken his actors along. Johnny Depp not only sings in coolly lethal tones but gives a performance that is affecting, theatrical and very unsettling. A venomous chameleon of a turn. We all know how Helena Bonham Carter can be poison ivy but here she plays it with a sort of brilliant dry wit but as the film enters into its gory, doomed climax, she sings a genuinely disturbing hollow note. Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin first appears as though he might not fit in but very soon one is reminded once again what Alan Rickman is all about. Timothy Spall as Beadle lays on such slime and slither that he’s the most interesting thing on screen whenever he’s on.

Like a true master of macabre, Burton casts the final image in more than fire and blood. He casts it in remorse, in guilt, in consequence. The cast of characters all meet their fate confronted by their own demons, their pasts, their vanities. What is left but to mourn and learn.

The razor cuts with delicacy through the flesh and pierces the heart.

(info and pics courtesy:- Wikipedia, Imdb, Impawards, Tom Sutpen, Madame Talbot)

Links:- Tim Burton
Opening Credits