director
Tim Burton
screenwriter
Andrew
Kevin Walker
screen story by
Kevin Yagher
Andrew Kevin Walker
based on
the story
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by
Washington
Irving
producers
Scott Rudin
Adam Schroeder
cinematographer
Emmanuel Lubezki
music
Danny Elfman
editors
Chris Lebenzon
Joel Negron
cast
Johnny Depp (Ichabod Crane)
Christina Ricci (Katrina Van Tassel)
Miranda Richardson (Mary Van Tassel)
Michael Gambon (Baltus Van Tassel)
Casper Van Dien (Brom Van Brunt)
Jeffrey Jones (Reverend Steenwyck)
Christopher Lee (The Burgomeister)
Richard Griffiths (Philipse)
Ian McDiarmid (Dr. Lancaster)
Michael Gough (Hardenbrook)
Lisa Marie (Lady Crane)
Christopher Walken (Hessian Horseman)
Martin Landau (Peter Van Garrett)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 105m
u.s.
release: 11/19/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other tim
burton films
reviewed on this website:
- big
fish
- charlie
and the chocolate factory
- corpse
bride
- ed
wood
- mars
attacks!
- planet
of the apes (2001)
|
When
discussing a Tim Burton film, you want to go on and on about
the mood and look of the piece, because the story is never much
to write home about. In Sleepy Hollow, based glancingly
on the Washington Irving story, Burton and his cinematographer
Emmanuel Lubezki give us a world of fog and chill; the blacks
are blacker than midnight in a coal mine, and the whites -- well,
there isn't much white, just gradations of gray. Burton doesn't
wallow in gloom; he luxuriates in it, and the result, for all
its drabness, is a work of great morose beauty. One almost wishes
that there were no script at all -- that the film were silent,
even.
Working for the third time with Burton (after Edward Scissorhands
and Ed
Wood), Johnny Depp steps forward out of the mist, hair
mussed and dark, clothes also mussed and dark, flesh paler than
anything else around -- once again, he's Burton's onscreen surrogate.
This time he's Ichabod Crane, a New York constable (not a schoolteacher
as in Irving) religiously devoted to "sense and reason."
It's 1799, the dawn of a new century, and Crane espouses the
future of detective work: new scientific advances, the strenuous
use of logic and deduction. In response, his superiors disdainfully
assign him to Sleepy Hollow, a bleak town where people have been
mysteriously turning up minus their heads.
Crane slouches into town, which is full of some of the great
eccentrics in modern movies, along with some veterans like Michael
Gough, who played Alfred in Burton's two Batman movies.
(If Sleepy Hollow were an utter dud, which it isn't, it
would be worth seeing just to hear Gough intone, in answer to
what became of the missing heads, "Taken ... taken by the
Headless Horseman ... taken back to Hell.") There's the
usual pious reverend (Jeffrey Jones, always fun to watch), a
gossipy magistrate (Richard Griffiths), and a prosperous couple
(Michael Gambon and Miranda Richardson) with a blond, angelic
daughter named Katrina (Christina Ricci). Crane keeps hearing
the local legend of the Headless Horseman, which he discounts
out of hand. Surely, he says, there is a logical explanation
for the murders.
There is, and that's where Sleepy Hollow falls down. Burton
isn't, nor should he be, a man of logic. He's an artist of spooky
intuition, painting with bullet-gray skies and gnarled branches
reaching towards us like skeleton's fingers. The movie, experienced
solely with the eyes, enfolds us in mesmerizing atmosphere --
a mood poem in tribute to the dark, gory, campy Hammer horror
movies Burton devoured as a kid. (A familiar Hammer legend turns
up in a cameo, and Christopher Walken in his scenes as the pre-headless
horseman is like the spirit of Hammer incarnate.) "I'm pinioned
to logic," says Crane at one point; unfortunately, Burton
is pinioned to the rather banal logic of Andrew Kevin Walker's
script (reportedly doctored by Tom Stoppard), which explains
everything and takes all the mystery out of what we've been watching.
Sleepy Hollow is two-thirds of a masterful gothic horror-comedy
-- for long stretches, it plays like an Edward Gorey tale in
live-action. But as it winds down, characters start spinning
around in ecstasies of exposition (which barely makes sense anyway),
and the movie begins to feel cheesy; an overlong stagecoach chase,
a recap of similar bits in Raiders of the Lost Ark and
Bram
Stoker's Dracula, is the mold on the cheese. The film
doesn't fully recover after its haphazardly conventional climax,
but everything leading up to it -- the tormented woods, the deep
thuds of hooves, the nightmarish splendor of the Headless Horseman
himself -- is superb. So I don't really have the heart to dwell
much on Sleepy Hollow's eleventh-hour loss of magic. I
just wish Tim Burton had trusted more in his own brand of logic
-- the dream logic of horror and fantasy, the unaccountable imagination
that gives us a villain who doesn't bleed and a tree that does. |
