Sleepy Hollow
With his film Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton presents a Halloween fairy tale very loosely based on Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Ichabod Crane is no longer a gawky and superstitious schoolteacher, who embodies his name and resides in Sleepy Hollow. Burton has morphed him into a New York constable with dashingly good looks (he is played by Johnny Depp). Neither is the headless horseman a legend anymore; he is now an actual ghost of a Hessian mercenary who has a penchant for cutting of heads with panache.
A proponent of the enlightenment and a bit squeamish, Crane will have his rational methodology and his nerve tested in Sleepy Hollow, the quiet Dutch hamlet in upper New York State, where the horseman is plucking off heads like apples in an autumn harvest.
As Crane’s inquiry into the crimes deepens, more headless bodies turn up and he is forced to reckon with the existence of a supernatural being, which always frightens the non-believer more than the believer. Crane’s investigation also exhumes his own childhood trauma, which he would rather leave buried. Evidently, the past is restless in Sleepy Hollow. Crane’s memories explain his denial of anything but the scientific and the rational, yet sometimes they seem more a vehicle for Burton to film another brunette spinning under the slow descent of another form of fairy dust, as he did with Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands. Burton wants to show the viewer that Christianity can be as wicked as witchcraft and that where we side in the age old battle between religion and reason depends on our experiences and upbringing, but he seems just as focused on his actresses’ chests. Christina Ricci is so disappointing in her role as Katrina Van Tassel that it is difficult not to ponder the role her figure played in Burton’s decision to cast her. Her acting aside, however, she is enchanting, like the whole aura and landscape of the film. With a painter’s eye, Burton hardly lets us down with his ghoulish visions, particularly since he teams up with Danny Elfman who continuously manages to orchestrate the proper mood.
The film’s script may be lacking, but Depp offers recompense as Ichabod Crane. A parody of certainty in a black coat and high white collar, he shows us how limited, even deluded, a stubbornly “made up” mind can be. Depp does this to much comical effect. Having adopted the animated manners of a silent film star, his balking gesticulations often undermine his brave words. Depp’s Ichabod Crane is a man thoroughly out of his element and he is fun to watch dealing with it. In this way, Depp brings a playful self-consciousness to his role that works with his encounters with the macabre, but not with his relationship with Katrina, which lacks sound development and dialogue. Irony might work wonders, but it cannot raise the dead.
That said, there is plenty of hilariously awkward charisma between Depp and the four town “dignitaries” (Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid and Michael Gough), who manage to look both suspicious of the crimes and too inept to commit them. Credit should also be given to Burton for his decision to cast Casper Van Dien as Brom Van Brunt, the strong jawed jocko whose cocksureness gets the best of him, a fate that underlines Burton’s agenda to behead the certain. Does Burton question the possibility of truth? Brom appears to be a statement upon that matter. To enjoy the film it is necessary to abandon our heads: to stop looking for deep answers. After all, the dark mystery at the movie’s center is a headless rider whose only lines of dialogue are “myaaaah” and “nyaaaaah,” which is to say that he is not the best messenger from the other side to whom we should field questions. To do so would be comparable to asking Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds what the meaning of life is. So, while reason and mysticism fail to provide the answers we are destined to now and again search out, mysticism can at least be beautiful, an aspect Burton cultivates, making his Western Woods in this film an enchanting, gothic garden I was reluctant to leave. The film deserves a B.
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