Sweeney Todd's hole in the world

 
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‘At last! My arm is complete again.’

Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) has rediscovered the razors he hid before his arrest. Now, he is an avenging hero bringing justice to an unjust world. Most importantly, he will find and kill the man who exiled him to Australia and stole his wife and daughter. Revenge will be sweet! There will be blood . . . and, naturally, there will be meat pies too, as a side-order.

Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical has been wonderfully adapted for the big screen by Tim Burton, whose graphic-novel style shrouds London with a palette of washed-out greys and blues, overcast skies and grimy buildings. This is Victoriana from a different universe to the cheery setting of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! It is a place where corruption, oppression and hypocrisy destroy people on a daily basis. This is a London of nightmares. Being a musical, most of the dialogue is sung, but this feature doesn’t intrude. In fact, it is amazingly successful, even for cinema-goers unused to the genre, because we are definitely not watching a show. Instead, the swirling notes and clever lyrics turn the whole piece into a rich, visual poem that eschews ‘tunes’ and instead provides glimpses into the swirling thoughts of a man obsessed. Like Evita, the film-maker has the freedom to use flash-backs and close-ups to highlight crucial plot details often lost on stage, and the result is a cinematic masterpiece. But this doesn’t mean you will necessarily like it: that 18 certificate is there for a reason.

We see the returned Benjamin Barker, as ‘Sweeney Todd’, rebuild his reputation as a tonsorial craftsman whose razor is fast and precise, pampering his clientele with compliments and eau-de-cologne, yet all the while plotting his revenge, waiting for that throat to present itself in his chair. He has allies, too. Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) is the proprietor of a struggling pie shop situated directly underneath his own establishment. Her initial sympathy for his plight turns to sharp business sense when they face the problem of a dead body’s disposal. Perhaps her trade in hot pies would benefit from a new source of fresh meat? Soon, their mutual interests are merged as he constructs a new barber’s chair that will send victims directly to her basement kitchen. There is also a small boy taking refuge from the workhouse and a savage employer. Could these three even live as a family? Mrs Lovett thinks so, but the dangerous secret of the barbershop and the pies must be kept very close, for there are enemies too. Sacha Baron Cohen’s rival Italian barber (with his own secrets) is a wonderful comic foil, Alan Rickman’s judge is a stylish embodiment of Corruption Incarnate, and Timothy Spall, a magnificently foul sidekick. The scene is set for a tragedy to play out its course. There will be pauses, reversals and surprises, but Barker will have his revenge. And there will be innocent victims too.

The story of ‘Sweeney Todd’ first appeared in Victorian times. The String of Pearls: A Romance, was published around 1850, one of many blood-and-thunder tales in The People’s Periodical. The initial story seems to have started out as a more conventional tale about thwarted love and stolen goods (hence the title), but the razors-and-meat-pies element gave this narrative a distinctive edge. Sweeney Todd has since reappeared in print many times, as well as on stage and the big screen. There is no proof that Todd or his barber-shop ever existed, but his story has an enduring mythic quality. Revenge has always been a selling point with a largely law-abiding public who cherish a little fantasy ‘direct action’, but the lyrics of this version take the idea further as Barker gazes out on a London street:

‘It’s man devouring man, my dear,
And who are we to deny it here?’

London, in his eyes, is a cannibalistic entity that consumes its own people. He and Mrs Lovett will simply take the idea to its logical conclusion, and live on the proceeds. They will embody the spirit of the city. As the film’s tagline says, ‘Never forget. Never forgive.’ Memorably, he sings on approaching the capital:

‘There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it . . .’

There is very little grace in this world at all. Like refugees deprived of all normal ideas of right and wrong in their pursuit of survival, Barker and Mrs Lovett create a cheerfully amoral lifestyle as the bodies pile up and the pie production line bubbles away downstairs. She has her dreams of future domestic bliss, whilst he dreams of that throat.  Unwittingly, they have become monsters, completely unaware of the moral consequences of murder. He will have his revenge, and she, her longed-for prosperity, and that will be that. At one level, you could call it a romantic fantasy of living out one’s dreams, but gradually, finally, the secret will slip out and there will be Hell to pay. Perhaps there was a death-wish lurking there, all along, as Barker declares:

‘The lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us, death will be a relief
We all deserve to die!’

This is a very low view of humanity, seen from the viewpoint of those at the very bottom of the pile. The only ideals in Barker’s view involve judgement and death. There is no hope, no chance of transforming the world. Everything is spiralling down. And yet, there is more to it. Recognising the world’s corruption could be the first step in a thought-process along the lines of:

• If the world is evil, then why should I care?
• I care because it should have justice.
• Where does that desire for justice come from?
• From something deep within me, that I know to my very core of my being.
• So where did that come from?

It doesn’t originate from within us, but from God who created us and ‘hard-wired’ us with a desire for justice. Because we are always so keen to assert our independence from God, though, this can easily be twisted by choice or circumstance, as with Benjamin Barker, into the personal pursuit of revenge. But God is characterised by love as well as justice, and love suggests another way to transform a corrupt world: a way that leaves no innocent victims and allows for the possibilities of joy and new life arising from the ashes. Love gives us the ability to know that we have value. Love leads us to desire fairness for others as well as for ourselves. Love finally has the power to overcome even the evil lurking within us. And if that starts sounding like the closing lyrics of a bad musical, try studying the apostle Paul’s words from the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13, as he explores how love actually works. It may require personal sacrifice to achieve this, just as it did for Jesus Christ 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. But his death on that cross is enough to cover the sins of everyone, both satisfying God’s justice and offering us the chance to encounter God’s love personally in a relationship with him. Benjamin Barker’s arm may have been made finally ‘complete’ when he rediscovered his razors, but something else in him (as there is in all of us) was incomplete, and that, finally, is where our attentions should finally lead us: to the God who can make us complete.

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