Short Takes

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET The ultimate in tonsorial terror, Stephen Sondheim’s grisly Grand Guignol operetta is the point on the graph where high art intersects with low entertainment: the lyricist-composer puts some of the loveliest melodies and most intricate wordplay ever written for the American stage at the service of gory killings, garish melodrama and cunning revenge theatrics. After seeing Tim Burton’s movie version, it’s hard to imagine another director catching its tricky mix of comic malevolence and tragedy so well. The director’s familiar gloomy-Goth visuals get their strongest showcase in years in Sondheim’s tale of a vengeful barber who sets his razor to work ridding London of customers, with the aid of a crafty meatpie maker. As Todd, Johnny Depp makes a sympathetically warped monster without softening the character’s indiscriminating bloodlust; as his cannibal chef Mrs. Lovett, the Paula Deen of corpse disposal, Helena Bonham Carter gives the role a boldly pathetic interpretation, less comic and flighty than either Angela Lansbury or Patti LuPone on the stage. Regrettably—and this is a major flaw for a movie this song-driven—her voice is too weak to carry some of the show’s best numbers, garbling the hilarious “The Worst Pies in London.” Also, fans will lament the cutting of the spine-tingling “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” and other stellar songs, although John Logan’s script gains in narrative momentum what it sacrifices of the score. But the supporting cast is marvelous, particularly Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall as Sweeney’s scheming nemeses, and Burton’s direction soars and slashes as the songs demand. At times, the movie appears almost an admission of the limits of Burton’s morbid romanticism—especially in the ingenious “By the Sea” number, where Sweeney becomes a sullen blot of scowling misery at the heart of Mrs. Lovett’s pastel fantasy. But after this coup, I can’t wait to see what he does next. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)

ATONEMENT I haven’t read Ian McEwan’s source novel, but Joe Wright’s briskly mounted movie version finesses the kind of literary devices that rarely work well in film—specifically, the shaping of a story in ways that reflect the storyteller’s selective filter. To say more would risk ruining the impact of screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s resourceful adaptation, which begins with a 13-year-old girl spying an ambiguous incident between her older sister (Keira Knightley) and their housekeeper’s son (James McAvoy). The aftermath ultimately splinters the destinies of everyone involved, leading to the World War II evacuation of Dunkirk and the grown girl’s determination to set things right. Complaints that this is yet another overstuffed volume of Musty Armchair Theatre seem silly, as the movie is more concerned with the wish-fulfillment fantasy behind this period piece than with the piece itself. Wright deftly handles the movie’s loops in time and hurdles the plot contrivances involving a fateful letter, stumbling only during a self-consciously arty long-take set piece at Dunkirk: the rest is an engrossing study of guilt and withheld absolution, right up to the ending that pole-axed McEwan’s readers. A major asset: Alexandre Desplat’s score, which translates a literary theme—embodied by a typewriter’s clatter—into a musical one. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)

CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR Using a shaggy-dog story from the waning days of the Cold War—about how a jerkwater Texas congressman took a break from hot tubs and cokehead strippers long enough to help Afghan rebels repel the Soviet horde—screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols turn backroom dealings and appropriations hearings into the stuff of knockabout verbal farce: the fall of Communism as His Girl Friday. Given that this well-intentioned chicanery ultimately leads to Osama bin Laden and Ground Zero, the movie’s tone (keyed to a score full of elegiac brass) seems daringly mock-heroic: it’s a shock to reach the end and see how unambiguously earnest the movie is about Wilson’s triumph, which it presents as a majestic blown opportunity rather than a precedent for dilettantish dabbling in the region. (Only an offscreen jet scream hints at the horrors to come.) A pity, because Sorkin has written some tumultuous harangues worthy of Preston Sturges, and no director has a sharper ear for the rhythms of conversation than Nichols. As enacted by a cast of inspired farceurs—Tom Hanks at his most comically assured as playboy Wilson, Julia Roberts as a honey-dripping socialite zealot, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a gruff CIA operative—it crackles even as it ultimately rings hollow. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)