SWEENEY TODD AND CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR

Two more in the proper-name-serious-film category.

I never saw the stage version of SWEENY TODD, though I know the music from it. I usually love Stephen Sondheim’s music, and there’s some great Sondheim music in SWEENEY TODD.

As for all the blood and pessimism, it may have worked well on stage, where the obvious unreality could have enhanced the humor in it, black as it is, but what Tim Burton has done with the film version is try to have it both ways, and for me, it ultimately doesn’t work.

Once he introduces the element of realism—into what begins as an almost animated film, a video game of a movie—by way of creating realistic cruelty and graphic throat-cutting, major arterial blood-squirting, and body part meat-grinding, I thought, why would I want to witness this?

If it came across in some way humorous on stage, it comes across for me on screen as a mixed bag of impressive performances (by everyone in it, stars and unknowns) and musical innovation, with snuff film exploitation.

I was scratching my head trying to figure out what all these obviously amazingly talented people intended an audience to get out of this literally deadening “entertainment.”

I was doing the same thing after I saw CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR (beware the words “based on” and “true” in the same Hollywood phrase). What an array of talent. Just watching Tom Hanks and Julie Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman interact is almost worth it. And it's certainly a more fun film to watch, if not more original, than SWEENEY TODD.

But there’s this exploitative edge to it, that seems to be catering to an audience that is easily taken with young women’s breasts, (and the rest of their bodies, but mostly breasts), that oversimplifies the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Afghanistan as a bloodbath in which the Soviets (always called “Russians” in this flick) massacre innocent women and children, rape and pillage etc. (no mention of the Soviet-sponsored Afghanistan state in which women could often dress as they liked, go to school, even become doctors and lawyers ala the Soviet Union—and I’m not excusing the brutality of the Soviet system’s oppressive side, it’s just a skewed picture of reality), and that oversimplifies the involvement of the C.I.A. and other U.S. government agencies and departments in that fight, etc.

It’s like a Hollywood razz-ma-tazz attempt to enshrine in film the lesson the movie-makers obviously hope this country has finally learned, that if we make a mess, we better be ready to clean it up or it may come back to haunt us.

But it’s a lame attempt, from my perspective, that comes off almost patronizing. As if we couldn’t handle the truth. Or as if this movie is intended for those who can’t, so have to be breast-fed it.