Johnny Depp menaces Victorian London in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (Paramount Pictures)
Sweeney Todd
This Christmas, Sweeney Todd is the anti-Scrooge, a good man gone very, very bad. In this blood-sodden holiday treat, director Tim Burton (who else?) uses deft, swift strokes to sharply adapt Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed 1979 serial-slasher musical.
Years after an evil judge (Alan Rickman, wonderfully pervy) sends him into exile, steals his daughter and drives his wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) to poison herself, once-joyful barber Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) returns to London’s Fleet Street with a trauma-stripe of white in his hair and a taste for revenge in his unsmiling mouth. Todd sees life as a roiling pit of inhumanity, a vision that sits just fine with Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the pie-shop owner who moons over the murderous barber upstairs. Theirs is a quid pro quo relationship: he cuts the throats, she makes the victims into meat pies. “We’ll serve anyone/And to anyone,” they duet prettily. Depp, Burton’s muse, can sing, sounding a little like a royally pissed David Bowie. Carter’s voice is thin, but she’s wonderfully blowsy, a rotting maternal figure in whiteface. The duo look like powdered corpses, just two of London’s many living dead.
Todd is the rare stage-to-screen adaptation that doesn’t make you long for the original. The sets – claustrophobic Gothic London seething with cockroaches and want — are inventive, the songs unhurried and the humour bang on. Sacha Baron Cohen, in his first post-Borat role, plays an Italian barber with fatal panache. But the film’s real force lies in the terrible yearning at the heart of the film: the un-cleanable mess left by revenge. (KO)
Sweeney Todd opens across Canada on Dec. 21.
Tom Hanks plans an invasion of Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson's War. (Universal Pictures)
Charlie Wilson’s War
Charlie Wilson’s War confirms every citizen’s worst fears about how government really works. The film is based on the true story of one congressman’s personal campaign to wage a covert — unapproved and undiscussed — war against the Russians who invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. Also disconcerting is how the film’s brisk, smarty-pants dialogue and lovable cast put the audience in the strange position of cheering on malfeasance, deceit and backroom wheeling and dealing. Go, undemocratic invasion! Wait – did I just say that?
Tom Hanks turns up his low-key charm to play Wilson, a middling Texas congressman and perpetual bachelor – the man loves a hot tub – who finally gets behind something that isn’t wearing a skirt. Well, actually a skirt is still involved: the ousting of the commies is proposed, and partially funded, by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a platinum-blond super-Christian millionairess who looks good “nuh-ked.” Hanks nails a quiet, assimilated Texas drawl; Roberts’s accent is lazy and unformed, like her performance. The love/lust story between the congressman and the socialite is wispy and unbelievable, but the chemistry between the congressman and the CIA operative (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who helps strategize the attack is smoking. In the scenes between these two men, Aaron Sorkin’s drum-tight script and Mike Nichols’s low-key direction come to a perfect point. As the flabby, volatile CIA hack and the butter-smooth congressman unite to buy weapons (in Israel) for Afghan rebels, they bond over a strong, crude sense of Cold War right and wrong. The horrors of the Afghan refugee camps are epic (and hauntingly depicted), but the men’s convictions are inevitably – fatally – misguided.
Wilson, according to this film, lobbied his peers in government to increase the funding for Afghan rebels from $5 million to $1 billion, with no approval from the American government or the American people. Then, of course, the U.S. withdrew its support as stealthily as it arrived, and the impoverished, demoralized nation sat ready for the taking by the Taliban. In this final act, Nichols, the legendary satirist, goes surprisingly soft. The “what happened next” looms over the happy ending, but not nearly largely enough. (KO)
Charlie Wilson’s War opens across Canada on Dec. 21.
Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank deal with romance after death in P.S. I Love You. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
P.S. I Love You
Stiff with phoniness, P.S. I Love You is a DOA rom-com that chokes on its own creepy premise. Beautifully turned-out Holly (Hilary Swank) becomes a babe Manhattan widow after her husband, beautifully Irish Gerry (Gerard Butler), dies of a brain tumour. But Gerry leaves a trail of hand-written letters commanding her to live her life: Get rid of my clothes! Sing karaoke! Go to Ireland and drink Guinness in my honour! Be happy! Happier! Dance, monkey, dance! The incredible narcissism of this epistolary stalking is passed off as a great, soul-shoring gift. It’s hard for me to admit this, but Sting is right, Gerry: If you love someone, set them free.
Of course, solid romantic comedies often spring out of unsound plots (The Apartment, When Harry Met Sally), but no one cares, because the comedy is constant and reaffirming, and we fall for the characters the way they fall for each other. But there’s no sexual energy between Holly and Gerry, alive or dead. She’s gratingly neurotic, he’s stupidly cheerful and they appear to share little in common other than really strict personal trainers, judging from their glinting, super-toned torsos as they romp in jammies through their fabulous boho apartment. With no glimpses of any real human essence — or loss — the film’s sole romance is with window dressing: P.S. I love cute friends, cute clothes, cute problems. Rent Truly, Madly, Deeply instead. (KO)
P.S. I Love You opens across Canada on Dec. 21.
John C. Reilly, right, and Amy Adams star in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (Columbia Pictures)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
The bloated, Psychology-101, montage-crammed music biopic is a genre that deserves a big satirical raspberry (that means you, Ray, and you, too, Walk the Line). In Walk Hard, John C. Reilly delivers the pfffflt with glee. Reilly’s bread-pudding face makes him an unlikely rock star, but his voice is perfect for the required era-hopping sonic mimicry. The journeyman character actor is also a great, gentle-giant comic, well cast to play winning simpleton Dewey Cox, southern guitar hero for the ages.
The story of Cox – a bounty-of-pun name in a film with clear Airplane aspirations – runs from Dewey’s troubled Depression-era childhood on a southern farm to the present-day overblown tribute concert, introduction by Eddie Vedder. In between, Cox meditates with the Beatles, goes folk, does every drug known to humanity, fathers dozens of babies with his dream-crushing high-school sweetheart (“I do believe in you. I know you’re gonna fail!”), gets a bad ’80s variety show and nurses deep artistic pain over having killed his brother with a machete as a child. “This is a dark, dark period!” he screams at one point while high as Keef and grinding on a groupie.
The film is a self-referential de-con that will delight movie and music obsessives. Neither too raunchy nor too mean, the breezy Walk Hard is another cheery product of the Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked-Up) machine. Jake Kasdan directs but Apatow co-wrote the script, and several of his usual players make appearances, including Paul Rudd as John Lennon and Superbad’s Jonah Hill in an uncredited cameo.
Walk Hard gets the constant smile, and the occasional laugh, but it’s not as brilliant as This Is Spinal Tap (maybe that film really was the last word on the rock star ego circus). Yet the songs, by Michael Andrews, are hilarious and beautifully constructed. The double-entendre Let’s Duet (with Jenna Fischer as a kind of June Carter to Dewey’s Johnny) is smart raunch with a country twang: “In my dreams, you’re blowing me… some kisses.” Reilly himself has deserved a front-and-centre part for far too long, and while this spoof doesn’t exactly lacerate, it pokes at the rock ’n’ roll clichés — and the lazy filmmakers who dine out on them — with a fan’s affection. (KO)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story opens across Canada on Dec. 21.
Denzel Washington inspires students in The Great Debaters. (The Weinstein Company)
The Great Debaters
If you want to celebrate the holidays with an edifying African-American history lesson, you could do no better than The Great Debaters, a predictable but well-made drama from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films. Denzel Washington directs and stars in this true story of a black college debating team that broke colour barriers and attained national fame in the Depression-era U.S.
Washington plays the poet Melvin B. Tolson, an imperious but inspiring professor who coaches the team by day and organizes a sharecroppers union by night. He provides the pattern of over-achievement for his pupils, who include the whip-smart but wayward Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), aspiring lawyer Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) and budding civil rights activist James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker). Forest Whitaker (no relation) is James’s stern but loving father, a brilliant scholar and preacher who also sets the bar high.
You know the story is headed for uplifting territory from the moment Tolson explains syllogisms to his new club recruits. This being the pre-civil-rights-era South, you also know the debaters will encounter some ugly racist obstacles on the path to glory. That the film remains engrossing is a credit to Washington’s assured direction, his own, Poitier-style performance and those of his co-stars. Young Denzel Whitaker – there’s a name to live up to! – is particularly engaging as James, a barely pubescent 14-year-old struggling with the gap between his intellectual and physical maturity. (MM)
The Great Debaters opens across Canada on Dec. 25.
Katrina Onstad and Martin Morrow write about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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