I've already left one of my miniature, amateur reviews for this film in the Last Movie You Watched thread. I do, however, have a couple of very specific questions which I thought I was probably better off asking here.
For anyone who's familiar with the original stage musical:
Spoiler Below What becomes of Anthony and Johanna? One of my only real qualms with this film was that these characters never received any closure at the end, which was kind of a shame since I'd been rooting for them so ardently throughout. I can understand why they opted to end as they did, with Sweeney slowly expiring beside the body of his wife, but there was still something which felt slightly amiss as a result. From what I can make out, the stage version has Anthony and Johanna running in with the police in the aftermath of the final slaughter, though I did question the wisdom of them mixing with the law, given that they are technically fugitives. Either way, are we to take it that things ended happily for them?
This one is more of an observation than a question as such:
Spoiler Below I thought it was interesting that Mrs. Lovett finally suffered a more brutal and agonising death than Mr. Todd himself...well, not that I'd know from personal experience, but I would have thought that being burned alive would have been a much more terrible way to die than having one's throat slit. Do you take this to mean than the story wants us to view Lovett as a more morally bankrupt character than Mr. Todd himself, given that she was stringing him along with his terrible deeds for the sake of her own emotional gratification? Or do you think that the question of morals was more-or-less irrelevent in this story?
Well, thanks in advance to anyone who can satisfy my curiousity there.