SLEEPY HOLLOW
STARRING: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, Ian McDiarmid, Christopher Lee DIRECTOR: Tim Burton WRITTEN BY: Kevin Yagher, Andrew Kevin Walker (based on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving)
By now, after Beetlejuice, two Batman movies, and Edward Scissorhands (also starring Depp), one might conclude that the sky in weirdo/wunderkind Tim Burton's world is decidedly black. Yet, his bleak Gothic imagery has always been tempered by a childlike wonder (perhaps best realized in the truly marvelous musical fantasy The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he produced and co-wrote.) Underlined with strange and sublime music from constant collaborator Danny Elfman, Burton's films have a unique, fairy-tale-like quality that has often endeared him to both critics and audiences in a rare synergy of art and commerce (although not always; 1996's Mars Attacks! was just plain dreadful, while 1994's critical favorite Ed Wood was box-office anathema.) These same artistic and commercial elements appear in Sleepy Hollow, but blend less smoothly thanks to writing flaws that complicate what should have been a simple and straightforward tale.
The film's plot bears only a passing resemblance to Irving's short story. Ichabod Crane is now a constable and forensic scientist instead of a schoolmaster. This allows the writers to cook up an unnecessarily convoluted murder mystery involving conspiracy and witchcraft, a whodunit that in its resolution makes even the origin of the Headless Horseman seem completely plausible in comparison. Thrown in for good measure is some uncalled-for subtext involving Ichabod's Puritan childhood. In fact, Sleepy Hollow is even less faithful to its source than the short but memorable Disney cartoon (the last half of 1949's Ichabod and Mr. Toad) that is, to my mind, still the best-- and scariest-- film version of 'em all (so memorable, in fact, that Burton includes several bits of hommage to it, like the toads that croak Ichabod's name as he nervously guides his old horse across a covered bridge at night.)
This is not to say that the film is a waste of time. On the contrary, it's worth ponying up the bucks just to see the patented Burton visuals (accomplished this time by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) married to Elfman's magical music. Pastoral vistas of upstate New York are as beautifully rendered as oil paintings, but the real treats are the gloomy little township of Sleepy Hollow and the gnarled, leaf-strewn forest surrounding it. They're like an Edward Gorey drawing come to ominous life. Even the few daylight sequences have a dreamlike, dark-at-the-fringes feel, and the characters all share an unhealthy-looking pallor that suits the grim (and often gruesome) proceedings. Depp's Ichabod Crane, with his constantly pursed lips and stiff, vaguely effeminate demeanor, matches Irving's conception in character if not appearance (in this respect, the Disney version is bang-on.) Ricci, on the other hand, matches Irving's physical description of Katrina Van Tassel letter for letter, but is neither coquettish nor fickle enough to be considered anything but a goody-goody. Thanks to the demands of a script that requires obligatory plot twists and action scenes, we are expected to believe things about both characters that simply don't add up. Worse, the villain is made to explain the whole messy mystery near the end, with the immediate and unfortunate result that we are suddenly yanked out of Tim Burton's darkly imaginative world and left sitting in a theater, watching something no more real than a Headless Horseman.
GRADE: **1/2
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