SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET - bizarre directorial decisions weaken a visually stunning film

An odd experience on Friday night - finally getting to see one of my cinema-heroes, Tim Burton, do a Q&A at a point where I was starting to lose faith in him. I was coming to terms with the fact that SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET had left me underwhelmed. I was wondering if Burton, like Wes Anderson and Kevin Smith, was joining the league of directors delivering diminishing returns. When Tim Burton first came to our attention he was doing something radically different. He was creating fables, even if they were set in contemporary America. He was creating slushy romances set against a bitter, twisted and hateful world. And when he took teen heart-throb Johnny Depp and mutiltated his face in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, he was radically altering our perception of the actor.

The years have passed by and we have seen Burton express his fascination with dark comedy, thwarted love and expressionistic horror films in myriad form. We've seen stop-motion animation, period horror stories and re-made children's novels. Now, with SWEENEY TODD, we get a musical. But in every case, the movies are very direct, unfiltered expressions of Burton's world. The heroines will have long blonde hair set in waves and almost white-blonde eye-brows. No matter which period the source material was set in, you are most likely going to see women in corsets and men in stocks and frock coats. Johnny Depp, the ominpresent hero, will have slightly crazy wavy hair. The photography will feature chiaroscuro lighting and an expressionistic use of colour, where it appears. Our thwarted lovers will finally be united but not after a couple of hours toiling against the world's mis-deeds. The humour will be dark - the orchestral score from Danny Elfman - rich and dominant. All these factors are distinctly Burton. I don't think he can make a movie any other way and be faithful to his interests and particular talent. But I have to say that I am becoming, well, a little bored by it.

SWEENEY TODD is a case in point. Johnny Depp looks like an older version of Ichabod Crane - the costume is the same - the only change a white stripe in his hair and rouge-noir under his eyes. Jayne Wisener, who plays Todd's grown-up daughter Johanna (badly, I mght add), is a dead ringer for Katrina Van Tassel. All the other characters and sets are dressed in an indistinct Burton-land - a sort of vague Victorian stock-horror look. The result is that the film doesn't feel new and interesting, even though the costume and production design is evidently brilliant. Another side-effect of Burton's choices is that the movie doesn't feel as though it's set in London. Sure, you see St Paul's on the sky-line now and again, but there is no respect for the topography of the area or the peculiarity of Victorian London. Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett's pie-shop are less claustrophobic and squalid than one might imagine. All in all, the London of SWEENEY TODD looks like a more built up version of SLEEPY HOLLOW.

So the movie feels familiar. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the framing and editing weren't also pretty weak. Too often, Burton and DP Dariusz Wolski created a beautiful tableau only to have the director/editor (Burton regular Chris Lebenzon) snap away in a jarring movement that destroys the mood. The final scene is a classic example of this. I also have problems with Burton's choices as a writer too. I'm all in favour of a slash-and-burn policy with regard to long musicals. I love that he cut out the Ballad of Sweeney Todd, which would have been an annoyingly didactic overture. But by refocusing the musical on Todd and, to a lesser extent, Mrs Lovett, Burton leaves his love story high and dry. For much of the film, I'd been bored to tears by the insipid Anthony (inspid performance too by Jamie Campbell Bower) blathering on about his Johanna, but all the same we were building toward an exciting confrontation. Johanna is hidden in a box in Todd's barber shop.

(SPOILERS till the next paragraph.) She discovers that Todd is a serial murderer and that he has just killed her guardian. She discovers that Todd is actually her father, Benjamin Baker, and that Barker was shipped off to Australia by a corrupt judge who then had his wicked way with her mother. Furthermore, she then discovers that her mother was alive until Todd just killed her! And now Todd is remorseful until he too has his throat slit. So, poor Johanna has just gone through an enormous revelation while sitting in the box in Todd's barber shop. Moreover, she has just run away to be with her Anthony. As boring as I found this character, and as annoying as I found the actress portraying her, it would have been nice to get her out of the box and give her some closure!

So much for the disappointments: what of the good? Well, despite all this grumbling, I did actually enjoy SWEENEY TODD for four simple reasons: first, Stephen Sondheim's score is brilliant and the lyrics very funny and very dark; second, Helena Bonham Carter is brilliant as the demented lover of an acknowledged murderer who bakes the corpses into pies; third, Johnny Depp is brilliant as Sweeney Todd, acting through his expressions rather than through words - his decent singing voice compensating for a dodgy British accent; fourth, Sacha Baron Cohen's scene-stealing performance as Italian barber Pirelli. (And take note, Depp fans, if you want to see a London accent done properly, the unmasked Pirelli is your benchmark.)

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET opened in the US in December 2007. It opens in South Korea on January 17th; Japan on January 19th; France, Australia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Iceland, New Zealand, Turkey, the UK and Venezuala on January 24th; Hong Kong, Lebanon and Portugal on January 31st. It opens in Denmark, Greece, Singapore, Slovakia, Brazil, Egypt, Argentina, Estonia, Finland, Spain, Germany, Swizterland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Belgium in February. It opens in Russia on March 6th.

BLACK DAHLIA - in which we are asked to believe that Hilary Swank is a femme fatale

Let us be very clear. THE BLACK DAHLIA is a sumptuous film. Dante Ferretti's production design and Vilmos Zsigmond's photography perfectly capture post-war Los Angeles. The costume design is also brilliant. Scarlett Johanson is superbly scaffolded with setting lotion, red lipstick and pleated pants.

But this movie is a tedious experience. It is also a sad experience for anyone, who like me, loves film-noir, loves Brian de Palma, has a fondness for Aaron Eckhart and a passion for grand-scale film-making.

What makes film-noir great? Powerful men with a neat line in biting jargon playing and being played by beautiful but messed up women....Byzantine plots where everything happens and nothing is solved....the seductive glamour of the seedy LA underworld contrasting with the bland apparent glamour of the surface....transgressive sex, heavy drug use, crime and politics, always politics, but always done with style and grace. These are the factors that are, to a greater or lesser extent, present in all noir classics - from THE BIG SLEEP to L.A. CONFIDENTIAL to CHINATOWN. For me, noir is about subversion. Subversion of The American Dream, of studio mores, of the MPAA, of bland, mediocre, mass-market "entertainment"......

These are the factors that are conspicuous by their absence in this new tedious, wasteful, frustrating movie. Let's start with the characters. Now, de Palma lucks out with Aaron Eckhart. He plays a typically noir character. He's hopped up on Benzedrine and neglecting minor cases to hunt down the vicious killer of The Black Dahlia - a young wannabe actress who got sucked into lesbian porn flicks and ended up disembowled in a ditch. Mia Kershner is also touching - playing the Dahlia in flashes of old audition tapes as well as the infamous porn flick. Her portrayal of bravado and vulnerability is really quite moving. If only we had seen more of it.

But everyone else in the movie is either mis-cast or under-cast. For instance, Eckhart's partner is played by Josh Hartnett who is decorative but hardly de Niro. Compare his low-wattage, deadpan to the point of deadwood performance in THE BLACK DAHLIA with Russell Crowe in LA CONFIDENTIAL. Both play naive cops who have to lead us through a maze of corruption. Crowe is a fire-cracker - emotionally involving us in the story. Hartnett lets all these crazy events and characters slide over his waxed chest like so much baby oil. The chicks are similarly hopeless. Scarlett J is - once again - decorative but uninteresting - an amazing feat considering she plays an ex-hooker turned home-maker. Who knew she could deliver a flat sex scene. But her performance is Oscar-worthy compared to Hilary Swank's turn as a moneyed bisexual Dahlia look-a-like. I admire Swank tremendously as an actress, but her choice of accent is forced and uneven and, sadly, it is just a fact of life that she simply does not look like a femme fatale. Scarlett J would have been infinitely better in this role. And let's not get on to Fiona Shaw. Her performance as Swank's dotty mother is so completely absurd that it undermines the entire movie - especially in the denouement.

Casting aside, this is also an exceptionally badly written movie. For the first hour, it rambles along having little apparent purpose and certainly very little to with The Black Dahlia Case. I kept waiting for the big "wow" moment, when it would just kick in a gear, but that never happened. However, there was a rather incredible and quick exposition at the end of the film - entirely unsatisfying in its neatness and absurdity. If in traditional noir everything happens but nothing is solved, in THE BLACK DAHLIA nothing happens but everything is solved.

Is there any reason at all to see this movie? YES YES YES. To see k d lang's superlative performance as a nightclub singer. Just don't expect anything else.

THE BLACK DAHLIA played Tokyo and Venice 2006 and is now playing in the UK and US. It opens in Portugal and Taiwan next week and in Slovenia and Italy the week after. October sees THE BLACK DAHLIA open in Gerany, Greece, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, Iceland and Spain. The movie opens in France and the Netherlands in November and in Sweden in December.