"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness." So spoke Pablo Picasso, and indeed, it's long been touted that good taste is the enemy of great art.
Tim Burton's decision to make Sweeney Todd didn't leave him much room for manoeuvre in the taste department. After all, the original musical was about a 'demon barber' who slashed his customers' throats and had their corpses turned into meat pies. Those pies are duly guzzled up by a delighted, albeit unwitting clientele in the shop downstairs. In a nutshell, this may be a period piece, but it's a far cry from Mary Poppins.
Burton is one of the most brilliant talents in contemporary cinema, and as usual, he's assembled a superb cast to weave his stomach-churning spell. Longtime collaborator Johnny Depp takes the lead role, excellent as always. Depp also reveals a stirling singing voice that has more than a dash of Bowie - he actually played in a band for many years, and was guest guitarist on the only great track on Oasis's Be Here Now album. Burton's wife, Helena Bonham-Carter, is Depp's lovestruck accomplice, in arguably her best role in years. Bringing up the rear we have a devilish Alan Rickman, a slippery Timothy Spall, and a glorious cameo from Borat star Sacha Baron-Cohen.
This brings us back to the question of whether Sweeney Todd is great art. Burton has always been a master of the visual, and the art direction effortlessly conjures the gothic seediness of Jack the Ripper's London. There is plenty of wit too, naturally of the blackest kind. However, sensitive souls may find many scenes hard to stomach. It's a given that the bad guys will meet a sticky end. But in Burton's film, a string of charming old gentleman are also lined up for the chop. Above all, the handling of the actual deaths is done in such a graphic way that attending a post-lunch screening would seem beyond foolhardy (don't even consider it if mince was on the menu). Seeing so many throats slit in close-up is hardly a cheery experience - and yet the deaths are shown in a luridly fetishistic fashion. The meat oven itself has more than a hint of Hitler's crematoria. And yet the spirit of the film is resolutely one of playful black humour - the deaths are served up as jolly entertainment.
One of the films that's repeatedly cited as one of the all-time greats is Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts And Coronets. Like Sweeney Todd, it's a black comedy about revenge and serial murder. It's a fantastic film. Yet Hamer's movie manages to deliver in style without a single drop of blood. We don't expect that nowadays of course, but the head-chopping of Burton's Sleepy Hollow seems like Bambi compared to Sweeney Todd. Is it the mark of a great director to show so much gore? In a film like Katyn, in which extreme violence is portrayed as a means to reveal tragic historical truth, there is a serious integrity in showing slaughter. Yet in that light, violence can only seem trivialised when delivered with the gay abandon that Burton employs. It's very fuddy-duddy and untrendy to say so, but surely Burton can do better.
Sweeney Todd is playing at cinemas across Cracow.
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