Filmmakers seeking a tried-and-true way to transport viewers into the mystic often shoot their movies at the "golden hour" — that fleeting instant when the setting sun seems to imbue the entire world with an almost supernatural glow. Tim Burton, however, is a director who does things differently, and though his new film is undeniably radiant, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street looks like it was shot inside a tomb, just after the golden hour's last gasp. The glow is all but gone, and the movie's twilight world seems to forever unfold in a moment just before the light gives out entirely.
Sweeney Todd is Burton's darkest film, visually as well as thematically, a velvety noir boasting more nuances of black than the Eskimos have names for snow. It's also a musical, based on Stephen Sondheim's popular 1979 stage production, although Burton eschews all but the faintest trace of Broadway glitz, giving the movie an exquisitely morbid look and an intimate, even claustrophobic feel. The director plays it close to the bone here, toning down personal tics while letting his unmistakable style shine through the darkness, so that Sweeney Todd emerges as a blood-rare slice of Broadway for people who normally can't stand the stuff.
To cut to the chase, Sweeney Todd is an amazing achievement. Sondheim's tale of a man obsessed with revenge on the corrupt judge who ruined him turns out to be a perfect vehicle for Burton, resulting in an extraordinarily satisfying fusion of the filmmaker's eccentric sensibilities and pure, sustained storytelling. It's hard to think of another director — or of an actor other than Johnny Depp — who could so thoroughly pull off a scene in which our antihero, a deranged killer, sings a love song to his knives.
Here, as elsewhere in the film, Burton and Depp strike just the right balance between theatrical exaggeration and gloomy naturalism, mining a mother lode of emotions prompting our laughter, our sympathy and our horror all at once. The next time someone starts prattling on about what a great job Denzel did exploring the inner turmoil of a man/monster in American Gangster, try not to roll your eyes; just think of Sweeney Todd and walk away.
Depp inhabits the title character with heartbreaking intensity and a hint of self-mockery, dark shadows ringing the inky pools of his eyes, a two-toned Cruella De Vil 'do framing a pasty face straight out of Dr. Caligari. This murderous, life-hating barber is the most dangerous sort of cynic, a former optimist who croons "There's a hole in the world" while wielding a straight razor with the destructive ardor of a jilted lover.
You might say that Sweeney's blade is a double-edged sword, a reflecting device from whose shiny surface Depp surveys himself and those he's about to butcher (it's probably an instrument indirectly descended from the camera-bayonet with which victims are both adored and dispatched in Michael Powell's classic Peeping Tom).
As far as style, the film layers it on in luxuriously decaying heaps, reveling in the promise that ripeness is all. Dante Ferretti's production design is consistently marvelous, and the movie's cleverly devised color scheme — an essentially monochromatic palette with tasteful splashes of blood red — is a distillation of everything Burton's done to date. Miles from the aimlessly goofy camp of Mars Attacks or the self-conscious, scattershot artistry of Big Fish, Sweeney Todd hones a tightly constructed, superbly stylized world, as perfectly self-contained a meta-reality as the Halloweentown of The Nightmare Before Christmas or the fractured suburbia of Edward Scissorhands. It's as elaborately creepy as it is beautiful to look at, this Victorian netherworld populated by sunken-eyed human shells as ambiguously alive as the animated cadavers of The Corpse Bride.
As elegant as it all is, Sweeney Todd doesn't spare the blood, and tender sensibilities should carefully note that throats are slit here with gleeful abandon, in abundant and graphic detail, with bright crimson fluids spurting and gushing every which way. Cannibalism, too, is key to the plot, providing material for both metaphor and humor (Helena Bonham Carter, as the demon barber's kindred spirit, savors the relative merits of turning lawyers, poets and priests into meat pies). The darkness threatens to swallow up the whole production, but it never does, and that frisson is half the fun of Sweeney Todd's bloody brilliance.
At the other end of the spectrum is the breathlessly anticipated big screen version of The Kite Runner, a production that turns out to be as handsome as it is curiously bloodless — unless, of course, you're counting the picturesque spattering of crimson dotting the ground after a noble character's off-screen rape.
Director Marc Foster's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's much-admired book spans several decades and no less than two far-flung worlds while laying out a scrupulously symmetrical tale of friendship, loss and jumbo-sized redemption. The story begins in Afghanistan in the late '70s, where privileged 12-year-old Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and household servant Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) are the best of friends despite obvious differences in class and ethnicity. Amir is also a bit of a disappointment to his father, who finds "something missing" in his overly sensitive and passive son. And for each of the boy's perceived character flaws, The Kite Runner makes sure to imbue his loyal pal Hassan with virtues bordering on saintliness.
The young actors are extremely engaging, but Foster doesn't dig too deep beneath the surface of Hosseini's novel, often reducing political and cultural nuances to glossy ethnic exotica and eschewing shades of gray for big, black-and-white emotions. Too many huge upheavals are crammed into too tight a space, with Afghanistan summarily gobbled up by the Soviets and then by the Taliban, followed by a barrage of coming-to-America soap-operatics in which the adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla) lands in California, romances a girl, struggles to become a successful writer and eventually returns to the motherland where an Act of Personal Courage waits to redeem him from the Very Bad Thing that occurred earlier in the film. Everything happens pretty much exactly as we expect, but the kite-flying montages look swell.
This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2007.