History will recognize the rich imagination and secret tenderness of Mr. Burton's best films. (From a purely technical standpoint, as in the award-ready cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, this grimly voluptuous "Sleepy Hollow" must be one of them.) But it will also raise the question of what we were smoking during this period of infatuation with grisliness on screen. It is not unreasonable to admire Mr. Burton immensely without wanting to peer at the exposed brain stems of his characters, but ''Sleepy Hollow'' leaves no choice. As written by Andrew Kevin Walker, who took off Gwyneth Paltrow's head in ''Seven'' and apparently considered that small potatoes, ''Sleepy Hollow'' turns the tale of the Headless Horseman into the pre-tabloid story of a rampaging serial killer.
SLEEPY HOLLOW is less the Washington Irving story than it is Scream set in post-revolutionary times. The themes of science vs. supernatural and appearance vs. reality appear throughout the movie, as Crane must understand his own past in order to see the truth. He describes himself as "imprisoned by a chain of reasoning." He keeps coming back to a toy given to him by his mother, a spinning disk with a bird on one side and a cage on the other. As it spins, the bird appears to be inside the cage, an optical illusion, and, not by coincidence, the very illusion (persistence of vision) that makes viewers think that the people in the thousands of still pictures that make up a movie are really moving.
Depp plays Crane with the right haunted look and rigid posture. But the ludicrousness of some of the plot turns and the exaggerated fright reactions leave him with the most outrageous eye-rolling since Harvey Korman's imitation of a silent film star. Indeed, the movie frequently brings to mind those sublime "Carol Burnett Show" movie parodies, especially when the villain ultimately finds time for a detailed confession as the planned final victim is waiting for the Headless Horseman to arrive. The wonderful Christina Ricci is wasted in an ingenue part.
Depp nearly reprises his role as Edward Scissorhands as a quiet wallflower (sans scissors), and whiter-than-white Christina Ricci (as the magic-obsessed love interest) sticks out among the drab fogies in their powdered wigs like Bill Gates at the Playboy Mansion. The supporting cast is uniformly bland, just like the scenery (though the latter is intentional). The sole exception is Walken, who plays the horseman (when he has his head, at least) with typical aplomb.
So what's the sum of the parts? What should have been a Halloween treat is instead a late-November humdrum flick worthy of a glance but little more. The story is obtuse yet unsurprising. The humor is sparse and occasionally funny. And while Burton's signature is all over the film, his typical wit is not.
How will the film fare at the box office? I can't rightly say, but I do know that a legion of junior high students is going to be disappointed, missing a whole lot of questions on their English Lit exams because of this movie.
One of the key shifts from the historical frame of Irving's earlier narrative to the contemporary setting of the film's production is the emphasis on visual perception. Sleepy Hollow shows the relativity of perception, and how the interpretive element of perception impacts matters of truth (Nietzsche is one key figure who stands between the original story and the current film). The half-blind Notary Hardenbrook exclaims at the beginning, "seeing is believing," and Crane himself distrusts the "magic" behind the supposed headless horseman until he sees it for himself and then goes into a brief crisis of faith (in science). When he recovers he takes a somewhat different tact in his solving of the crime. Before "seeing" the non-rational actions of the undead Horseman, Crane is depicted utilizing various optical lenses—absurd contraptions that seem to be borrowed from Terry Gilliam's films. After this crisis Crane no longer utilizes his instruments, though he does keep his head about him, reasoning through the crimes, relying on a sort of "inner vision."
Another important development in the interim between Irving's story and the current film is, of course, psychoanalysis and its artistic prodigy, surrealism. Burton's films are constantly shifting between dream life and lived life—although with his films' consistent dark exposures, it is difficult to tell the difference—and the exquisite scenes here seem like dreamscapes, often borrowing from the ethereal, Romantic, Hudson River School paintings of Cole and Bierstadt. The internal, dark shades that pervade the first Batman films, or the Nightmare Before Christmas, are present here as various unconscious connections are made visible—a traditional mode of surrealism.
The film is also crippled by a terribly contrived romantic subplot involving a miscast Christina Ricci (it pains me to say that), who looks perfectly period but can't manage to wrap her mouth around the movie's formal dialogue or its highly mannered acting style. She falls for Ichabod, much to the chagrin of her beau, played by Casper Van Dien ("Starship Troopers") -- doing his very best Billy Zane-in-"Titanic" imitation. Thankfully, he gets waxed by the Horseman after only three lines of dialogue.
Other players include Miranda Richardson as Ricci's more-than-meets-the-eye stepmother and a razor-toothed, wild-eyed Christopher Walken, who plays the Hors
On the production end of things, "Sleepy Hollow" is a fabulous, high-tech homage to the moody, old-fashioned horror flicks of the 1930s, bent to fit the Burton mold. The pale, moon-lit tones generated by a perma-dusk sky; rich but somber costumes (bad teeth, even!); craggy, foggy, sound stage forests of imposing, twisted, leafless trees -- it's all quite absorbing.
As I wrote in Horror Films of the 1990s, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow opens with a droll visual joke that, in some fashion, very ably exemplifies the film's nature. Perhaps this joke is one that only the longtime horror movie enthusiast will fully understand. As the film commences, what appears to be very fake-looking red blood drips down upon a parchment. This fluid is soon revealed instead to be hot wax, used merely to seal an important letter. Yet for a fleeting -- and wonderful -- moment, the horror audience may believe it has actually returned to the wonderful and bygone world of Hammer Studios since the hot wax resembles that trademark Hammer-styled “fake” blood.
The joke is not only an example of inside baseball, so-to-speak, but an indicator that Burton has fashioned his entire 1999 film as an homage to the output of Hammer. As Michael Atkinson and Laurel Shifrin write in Flickipedia, the director “continues his unique, idiosyncratic, and very personal career project: to re-experience and revivify the toy chest of pop-culture effluvia that sustained him – and many of us – through our ‘Nam era childhoods.” (Chicago Review Press, 2007, page 21.)
Or, as Wesley Morris wrote in The San Francisco Examiner: "what Burton does perhaps better than even Steven Spielberg: transport you to a nook in your childhood, be it around a summer campfire or smack in front of a TV set on a Saturday afternoon."
In the visual language of a Hammer Studios film then, the impressive Sleepy Hollow asks its audience to contemplate the nature of life on Heaven and Earth. Is science the key to understanding it? Or is there room, yet, for magic in this world? In scenes both lyrical and poetic (particularly those involving Lisa Marie as Ichabod's mother), Burton's Sleepy Hollow seeks the answer.
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