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**** Sweeney Todd
Directed by Tim Burton. Written by John Logan, based on the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, based on the play by Christopher Bond. With Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen. (R)

What could be scarier than a serial-killing barber on the loose in Victorian London? Maybe the prospect of seeing a beloved and notoriously hard-to-sing musical brought to the screen with a cast of scant vocal ability. But if Sweeney Todd could survive Patti LuPone playing the tuba (as she did in the recent Broadway revival), it can survive anything. Viscerally scary and utterly strange, Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's show has gotten it exactly right.

Almost monochromatic, so that the profuse blood will run even redder, production designer Dante Ferretti's Fleet Street is as stylized as the penny-dreadful melodrama that spawned the musical. Within that world, with no regard for the conventions of film make-up, Burton puts the powder-caked Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as Sweeney Todd and the pie-making Mrs. Lovett. With their heart-shaped faces and retro aura there could not be a more perfectly matched couple. From the very beginning, the characters sing without the framing devices contemporary movie audiences are supposed to require. The score may have been truncated by an hour, but this is a movie musical that makes no apologies for being one.

Still, this is a musical, and of the stars only Sacha Baron Cohen has the voice for it. Depp is no Michael Cerveris, and his sub-Billy Idol growl tends to veer anachronistically into rock (this is Stephen Sondheim, not Schwartz). Yet his Sweeney manages to be both scary and sympathetic—no mean feat when your friends are razor blades. Bonham Carter, running out of breath in "The Worst Pies in London," slaps roaches with a rolling pin to compensate for the jokes she's missing. The large orchestra—mixed louder than the singers to convey the emotions their thin voices can't—threatens to swallow them whole.

Instead, they have the camera. Through close-ups, Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett finds an emotional depth that would not be possible onstage. At the same time, Burton opens up the stage play to droll effect in "By the Sea" and more terrifyingly in "Epiphany." Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett see London through cracked and mottled windows. And Burton takes one lyric literally—I don't think that's meat coming out of the grinder.

Then there's that glorious music. With its debt to the film scores of Bernard Herrmann (listen to the strings in "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," heard without lyrics during the opening credits), Burton has, in a sense, brought Sweeney Todd home. It's been almost 30 years since a Sondheim musical made it to the big screen, but with Follies in development (with Sam Mendes directing and Aaron Sorkin writing the screenplay), it won't be long until the next one. Maybe next time they'll cast some singers, but this one works just fine without them.

*

*** Charlie Wilson's War
Directed by Mike Nichols. Written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by George Crile. With Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts,
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. (R)

The tale of Charlie Wilson, the hard-partying Texas congressman who channeled one billion dollars to the Afghan mujahideen in the largest covert operation in U. S. history, is stranger than fiction. Stranger still is Tom Hanks playing the coke-snorting, stripper-canoodling Wilson. But since this is Tom Hanks, no longer just the star of Bachelor Party, we never see him snorting anything stronger than a single-malt scotch in Charlie Wilson's War. Or canoodling, for that matter. Even the office pick-up (Emily Blunt), in a scene that is supposed to show how irresistible Wilson is, passes out before he's taken off his cowboy boots.

Wilson's co-conspirators were Houston socialite Joanne Herring (a miscast Julia Roberts) and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (a wry Philip Seymour Hoffman).All three stars sport distracting wigs. But once this amusing history lesson gets going—and with Aaron Sorkin's wonkish, motormouth script, it gets going pretty quickly—the conspiracy expands to include a young CIA weapons expert, an Israeli arms dealer and the president of Pakistan. Keeping it all straight are Wilson's bevy of buxom assistants, who were known as Charlie's Angels.

Of course, weapons don't win wars all by themselves, and curiously absent from the receiving end is General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the mujahideen commander known as the Lion of Panjshir. This is Hollywood, in which downtrodden people exist merely to be saved by a heroic American, and aside from a visit to a refugee camp in Peshewar, the Afghans don't have a voice. Instead of strategically planned operations, we get a protracted scene in which two Afghan peasants aim a missile at a Soviet helicopter gunship, scored to a jokey choral number in the style of the Swingle Singers. The ensuing explosion dissolves into a close-up of Amy Adams' ass. Is this satire? A patriotic wallow? With director Mike Nichols' shifts in tone it's hard to tell, and harder to tell why this story is being told now. To celebrate a more successful military venture than our current debacle, albeit one that left a cache of weapons for the burgeoning Taliban?

Massoud was killed by suicide bombers posing as journalists on Sept. 9, 2001, in a hit ascribed to Osama bin Laden. Blowback's a bitch. At least Charlie Wilson knew that.

*

*** 1/2 The Kite Runner
Directed by Marc Forster. Written by David Benioff, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini. With Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Zekiria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada and Shaun Toub. (R)

For a different perspective on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its consequences, there's the film of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel The Kite Runner. Like the upcoming animated film of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel series Persepolis (which chronicles Satrapi's experience of the Islamic Revolution in Iran), The Kite Runner shares the perspective of the educated upper class—that is, those who got out. For those who think of Afghanistan as a nation of poppy farmers, the first half of The Kite Runner is an eye-opener. Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) lives in a chic modern house in Kabul with his intellectual father (Homayoun Ershadi, of A Taste of Cherry), and, like Satrapi, his best friend is a servant, Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), whose flat nose marks him as a member of an out-of-favor ethnic group. Hassan is always ready to defend the wimpy Amir with a slingshot. Their friendship, involving kite-fighting, American movies and storytelling, makes for some of the most engaging filmmaking this year.

The second half of the movie, like the book, is something else entirely. Amir and his father escape the Soviets for California, where Amir is now played by the charisma-free Khalid Abdalla (United 93). Aside from a fascinating glimpse at the way old ethnic rivalries play out in a California flea market, the story becomes much less interesting. David Benioff's screenplay hits all the plot points—Amir falls in love, gets married, becomes a novelist—but like the book this section feels so ordinary it might as well be autobiographical. Then, like the novel, the story takes a turn into shameless melodrama, as Amir returns to a ravaged Kabul now ruled by the Taliban and, apparently, the coincidental mechanics of Charles Dickens.

In the end, there's something slightly icky about the way Amir absolves himself of his childhood sin. There's something ickier still about the way The Kite Runner plays on the Western stereotype—well documented by both Sir Richard Burton and UNICEF—of Central Asia as a hotbed of man-boy love. Pedophilia is an easy way to get the reader's dander up, but Hosseini never contextualizes it within an Islamic culture that only permits males to fly kites. For the rest of that story, see Persepolis.

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