Sleepy Hollow (1999)

reviewed by
Stephen Graham Jones


Sleepy Hollow: lost in the age of reason

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has traditionally been classed with children's lit., and is subsequently invoked every Halloween along with Charlie Brown specials etc. Which is to say the figure of the headless horsemen has--via steady bombardment (see: product placement)--lost much of its scare power, become tame enough for the kids. That's all past tense, now, with Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, which (re)injects fear back into Irving's story much as Michael Cohn returned the macabre to Snow White (1997). Of course, too, we all know that the old fairytales were pretty harsh to start with--the oral equivalent of a warning sign, the grammar-school equivalent of 'scared straight' programs--but all those fairytales are imported, have their roots in Europe and Central Europe. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, on the other hand, is American, which is to say still new. Who'd have thought there was anything Grimm going on between the lines? But there is, or there can be. 1799 does belong to the same decade as the Salem Witch Trials, after all (see Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" for a Pre-Burton, Burton tone).

And we all know the story: a bungling Ichabod Crane stumbles into Sleepy Hollow, into the mystery of a 'headless' horsemen with a vorpal blade. It's Scooby Doo stuff, yes, all reliant upon levels of curiosity never really accounted for in character. So, Burton and screenwriter Kevin Yagher simply changed that, made Ichabod not a schoolteacher, but something like the first forensic pathologist (~Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson). Altering the job title isn't quite enough, however, so they take it one step further, and have 'Constable' Crane's superiors charge him with figuring out these decapitations. It's more than just a droll homicide case for Ichabod, though. Sleepy Hollow is his one, good chance to prove his "trappings of scientific investigation"--a host of DaVinci-clever autopsy devices. The bad thing is, his one good chance turns out to be impenetrable to reason. It's hard to measure the supernatural.

There are a few carryovers from the old version, though, too: Ichabod is still slightly bungling, in the sense that he's prone to feint when dramatically necessary. And, when he can stay conscious, he tends to use children as shields. When he's unconscious, though, we get to see his inner life to a certain extent--what personal demons are driving him to privilege science over the supernatural. So perhaps his feinting is simply economical, an easy way into his head. Another carryover is Ichabod's romantic involvement with Katrina (Christina Ricci), which develops nicely, under the watchful eye of both her current suitor (Caspar Van Diem) and her current mother (Miranda Richardson).

And then of course there's the headless horsemen, Hessian mercenary Christopher Walken at his evil best, made to fit for Burton's colonial America, where the dead are restless and the cleavage rampant. He does keep it all reined in, though--never gets quite lost enough in the period that he thinks he owns the story, can change its fundamentals (1995's Scarlet Letter). Well, he almost doesn't get that lost. The one time he does, when ascribing motives to who turns out to be the 'real' bad guy here, he sets things up such that the bad guy is simply serving some justice on Sleepy Hollow, albeit it with interest. Which typically allows only two endings: either the town accepts responsibility for starting the whole mess or the bad guy kills them all. Sleepy Hollow takes neither path here, but instead seems to ignore the whole issue, which leaves an important narrative development conspicuously undeveloped. In it's defense, though, it does give Washington Irving's tale back to the adults, who themselves may not be quite old enough for the graphic nature of some of the decapitations.

(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com


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