“The Closest Shave You’ll Ever Know”
scrappybadger January 7th, 2008
Piig and I finally got around to seeing Sweeney Todd this weekend after several postponements. I had extremely high expectations, which I generally find leads to a little bit of disappointment, but the movie was actually quite good. It was good enough, in fact, that the almost 2 hour story line felt a little rushed.
Sweeney Todd was a must-see for me — a real triple hitter. There’s Johnny Depp, who I really like as an actor, a nineteenth-century setting right up my research alley, and the fact that its a musical. I love musicals — campy, weird, musicals. I don’t think most people would be able to guess that, but what can I say, I’m a big ball of contradictions.
I also really like Tim Burton’s cartoonish realism and realistic cartoons; he melds the two into something completely new. His dark humor appeals to my love of unhappy endings, and I have a soft spot for those pale characters, both real and cartoon, with the big, dark eyes. I don’t know why, but I just love them. As usual, he delivered on all fronts.
Lots of people have mentioned the violence in the film, but even that was classically Burtonesque. The blood, for example, wasn’t really the right color. It was heavy on the orange which made it more like the primary and secondary color swatches in an elementary art room than the gushing of a severed carotid artery. That makes sense, though, given that much of the slicing and dicing happens while Depp’s Sweeney Todd sings morbid show tunes.
There were even a few feminist messages in the movie. Without giving away too much I think I can say that the movie didn’t make light of women trapped, literally or figuratively, by men. It examined, ever so briefly, sexual depravity by way of Judge Turpin’s character and hinted at women’s sexual subordination and denigration. It also commented on a blinding (and ultimately deadly) obsession with beauty, and the only female character with even a small hope of a positive outcome complicates any fairytale reading that you could have of her future life. The movie comments, too, on classism, but it does so in a much more direct way, making it unlikely that the average viewer would generalize those ideas to everyday life.
Ultimately the movie comes back to something Sweeney Todd says within the first five minutes of the film. He tells a young sailor friend that life is difficult and sometimes it sucks; the man is young enough (and financially secure enough) that he simply hasn’t experienced that part of life yet. It’s something I’ve been feeling a lot lately as my young shine has started to wear off a bit. As I start to show the first few signs of tarnish, I have to acknowledge that nothing is as easy as it used to seem. It isn’t a realization I wanted to come to, just as Sweeney Todd didn’t want to be grizzled by years of hard work, false imprisonment, and thoughts of revenge, but there it sits nonetheless.
