Much has been made of the gore in Tim Burton???s film version of Sweeney Todd, which seems to me to be a bit hysteric. If you???ve seen one contemporary cinematic blood bath, you???ve seen them all, and if you produced mathematical proof that there???s more blood here per minute of running time than in, say, Hostel II (from which Burton, actually rather worryingly, borrows the device of spurting corpse-as-shower), I???d be surprised. In fact, blood doesn???t make an appearance until fairly far into the film, and at least initially, the focus is not on the wounds of the victim, but on the assailant???s rage.
Like Atonement, this season???s other high-profile adaptation of a highbrow contemporary text once thought to be unadaptable, Burton???s crack at Sweeney Todd works best when it serves to support the inherent perversity of its source. The director’s mashup of Steven Sondheim???s musical with his own, patented, teenage Goth sketchbook aesthetic may play like German Expressionists-do-Torture Porn, but the brutality is mostly farce. As in Sondheim, Burton’s Sweeney Todd is most disturbing when it???s talking about love.
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