Sweeney Todd–Zhuoya Li
I watched the movie Sweeney Todd by Johnny Depp. From The beginning of the movie I can feel that it is full of darkness and evilness. The blood flowing over the scene of the picking song foreshadows that this movie will be bloody and ruthless. The makeup of Todd is basically white face with smoky eyes. The only thing this and many other makeups can remind me is vampire. In the song of Todd, we get the idea of what happened to his wife, his daughter and himself. He repeated again and again that these upper-class are all wolf with goat’s skin. It makes the contrast that when Todd sings about the ghosts of London, the scene is mostly dark. When the evil is actually happening, like Turpin rapes Todd’s wife and everybody is making fun of it, the sense is lighted. How ironic it is that these rich people are hypocrite with “light” and sinister at the same time. The masquerade of people wearing masks also suggests this point of hypocrisy.
After the competition between Todd and a swindler who use urine as medicine, Todd invited Bamford to his shop for a free service. From here we can see how good Johnny Depp is at making people vicious without revealing it. Todd speaks with a sneer to disguise his hatred towards Bamford, praising that he represents equality. When Todd is truly raging, we can see his ferocious break out of anger in his killing of that swindler. For normal person, anger has to be expressed through words and gestures, but Todd can only uses his facial expression to make himself a lion. He does it every time he sees his enemies, and I am deeply impressed by him combining superficial “hospitality” with hostility without being recognized by his enemies.
When Turpin and Bamford talks about the decision of hanging a young boy, it seems Turpin wants to say something but he swallowed it back. It is not hard to conjecture that this boy does not commit anything serious enough to be hanged. Turpin said to himself that no one has not commit crime enough to die, and smiles grudgingly to Bamford after that. From that smile we can guess that Turpin feels guilty of killing the boy and he needs to comfort himself by forcing out a smile.
Even when Todd and Lovett are dreaming about their future, the whole scene is more darker than the nature should be. Todd never really smiles when Lovett is singing about all those bright future scenarios. Whatever he is doing in their dream, either sunbathing or meeting with friends, he is always with his straight face. It makes me wonder why he never ever feels happy, and only until later do I realize that Todd loves his wife so deeply that he never forgets about her. Toby understands that Todd is indeed a beast, that he is disguising his cruelty to Lovett. Lovett loves Todd so much that she chose to cheat herself and believe in Todd’s love of herself. Unfortunately, Lovett underestimates how heavy Todd’s affection towards his wife is, that Lovett’s deceiving of Todd and death his wife completely destroys Lovett. Maybe till she is in that fire stove does she realized she was betting on the wrong person, and the cost of losing this bet is her life.