Director Tim Burton's films are nothing if not stylish. Think of the grimy but sleek darkness of Metropolis in Batman, the extraordinarily creative color and costumes of Beetlejuice, and the high-tech computer graphics of Mars Attacks! So it's no surprise that Burton's latest, Sleepy Hollow, starring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, is a beautifully dark vision of early America. That the story, loosely based on Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," sometimes loses its way is also typical of Burton's work, but the visuals are so spectacular the audience might not care.

The movie opens with what appear to be little flecks of blood dropping onto a piece of paper. It turns out the red substance is just wax being used to seal a will, but it won't be long before real blood is flowing. The opening sequence, in which an elderly man riding in a stagecoach confronts the headless horseman, is a spectacular example of using evocative but sparing visual clues and subtle sound effects to create something genuinely scary. An ominous scarecrow in the field, moonlit fog seeping along the road, the tell-tale sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath--Burton uses these and much more to draw us into his fantastical world of sorcery and terror.

Sleepy Hollow then cuts to Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), a New York lawyer in Burton's version. Crane is fighting an uphill battle of bringing the justice system into the modern age when he's sent to the remote town of Sleepy Hollow to solve a series of murders that have been committed. There he meets with the town fathers, a motley crew of superstitious clergy, judges, and gentry. They explain that the murders are the work of a headless horseman who's haunting the town. Crane being a man of science, has little time for such nonsense, that is until he actually meets the horseman.

But before he does that, he meets Katrina (Ricci), the elder Van Tassell's daughter, who may or may not have something to do with the horseman's rampages. For that matter, almost everyone in the town comes under Crane's suspicions. In the tight-knit, in-bred village of Sleepy Hollow, almost anyone would have reason to be in league with a force that can quickly advance a fortune on to the next person in the will.

This begs the question, though: what is the headless horseman? A man in disguise who manipulates the fears of simple folk? A demon sent from hell? An undead creature who must somehow regain his head before he can rest forever? Burton and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) do a nice job through the first half of Sleepy Hollow in raising more questions than they answer. Realizing that not knowing creates more suspense, the filmmakers pair the periodic arrivals of the horseman with some gorgeously eerie shots of late-fall New England and shadowy rides through overgrown forests.

Unfortunately, while Burton spends all this time creating suspense, Johnny Depp (Dead Man, Donnie Brasco) spends much of the film undercutting it. Adopting a highly mannered acting style that repeatedly provoked giggles from the audience, Depp seemingly decided that Crane is a character who should react with outrageous facial expressions and stuttering lines. Or maybe it's not Depp's fault, as some minor characters, including Van Tassel's wife (Miranda Richardson, Tom and Viv), seem afflicted with a similar case of affected acting. Fortunately, Ricci (Opposite of Sex, Addams Family) gives another strong performance, though her buxomly, whiter-than-white witch gets a little cloying toward the end.

Also falling apart at the end is the story. As the conspiracy gets stranger and stranger, the narrative loses both steam and control. And the final chase through the forest--complete with over-the-top lighting, music, and histrionics--casts off the subtlety that Burton used so effectively earlier in the film, leaving us with a climax reminiscent more of Raiders of the Lost Ark than the first half of Sleepy Hollow.

Through it all, though, we have cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's incredible visuals and Rick Heinrich's amazing production design. There are so many iconic images in this film: a horse and rider jumping full stride out of a tree, a flaming pumpkin on top of a scarecrow, and landscape shots that update old Hudson River School paintings with a darker tint. And the costume design for the horseman (played by Ray Park, better known for his work as Darth Maul in (Phantom Menace) is a marvel of design and style. Sleepy Hollow seems a sure bet for Oscar nominations in some of the production categories.

Filmgoers bothered by sorcery/witchcraft might want to pass on this one, though. That element of the story has been highlighted, particularly in an otherwise admirable character. And of course there's a lot of violence, but then it is a movie about severed heads. But if atmosphere and style are what you're after, then Sleepy Hollow is well worth seeing.

J. Robert Parks  11/19/99

When I attended a screening of Tim Burton's new film Sleepy Hollow last week, I was not surprised to hear euphoric cheering, half-hearted applause, and outraged boo-ing as the end credits rolled past.  On the way out, several people grumbled about how Burton consistently disappoints us, failing to provide anything of substance.  It is worth mentioning, though, that those same peeved viewers had waited in line eagerly with the rest of us for 90 minutes just to feast their eyes on Burton's latest achievement.  Substance or not, we love this guy.

Since he stormed into the spotlight with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Burton has occupied a unique corner of eccentricity in the faculty of big box-office directors.  He's provided us with so many unforgettable characters and spectacles--Michael Keaton's melancholy Batman and hysterical Beetlejuice, the big screen's most memorable suburban landscape in Edward Scissorhands,  Michelle Pfeiffer's most memorable role in Batman Returns, Martin Landau in Ed Wood, and the breakthrough stop-animation of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Burton's works are hard to classify; they make a comedy out of a horror, showing up the conventions of scaring people for the silly parlor tricks that they usually are. (His only sincerely scary accomplishment remains the Landau performance of a sad and despairing Bela Lugosi in "Ed Wood".) 

Still, Burton's work only seems to increase the disdain many have for him. Many were shocked that Mars Attacks!, the first movie to be based on a series of bubble gum cards, was frivolous and thinly plotted.  In response to Sleepy Hollow, The Chicago Reader's  Jonathan Rosenbaum bemoans how Burton disrespects the integrity of Washington Irving's novel, while William Arnold of the Seattle P-I is upset that the movie if devoid of suspense and horror.  Clearly, Burton's Sleepy Hollow does not even attempt to recreate Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  It's not very scary. When the monsters in the movie actually HAVE heads, they're of the cartoony Beetlejuice variety.  And when the action rises to Indiana Jones pitch (there's a nod to the classic truck chase here), Burton is far too busy looking for good laughs to inspire any genuine screams.

Sleepy Hollow is a hilarious tribute to the old-style Hammer horror that loved to announce how scary it was.  Entertaining but artless, they TOLD rather than SHOWED.  And there is a lot of telling in this film. 

In Burton's version of the story, Ichabod Crane is a constable from New York whose penchant for deduction carries him to solve a particularly riddling series of decapitation homicides in the backwoods village of Sleepy Hollow.  The gallery of grizzled geezers who greet him there (Michael Gambon, Jeffrey Jones, Ian McDiarmid, and Burton's beloved Michael Gough) waste no time trying to outdo each other with quavering voices and tales of woe.  When the incredulous Crane stammers, "The heads were taken?!" Gough rasps:  "Taken... taken by the headless horseman... taken.... BACK TO HELL!!"  If you try taking this melodrama seriously, you've already lost any chance of enjoying this picture.

In spite of its satire, Sleepy Hollow does provide more substantial treats than any Burton film since Scissorhands.  The director's work with actors is steadfastly brilliant.  There is no better actor/director team than Johnny Depp and his curious coach.  Depp's Ichabod is a pillar of cowardice, a pale, jittery man who is all too quick to hide behind women and children when the monster rides into town. While Christina Ricci has an enchantingly cherubic face to charm feeble Ichabod, and while the talents of others like Miranda Richardson are given a lot of over-the-top license, it is Depp who holds our attention in this context.

And what a context.  Sleepy Hollow is, above all, beautiful to look at.  Instead of using special effects to make things look real, Burton works the other way, making everything look like a painting.  From Irving, he selects only the elements that interest him most: windmills, scarecrows, haunted houses, hard restrictive Bibles, mysterious witchcraft symbols. There is more mist than forest in this forest, and what trees there are look absolutely miserable.  The townsfolk fare no better... all but the children are physically warped in one way or another by bitterness, arrogance, greed, jealousy, or fear. Grownups are hard, cold and suspicious; religion and the law are instruments of torture. 

Freud would have had a field day with this film, postulating on Burton's own childhood in view of how threatening and wicked these people really are.  Adults tend too loom over the camera, glowering, punishing.  Perhaps the movie's biggest surprise is that the horseman is not the story's greatest villain.  Ichabod's memory of his own vindictive father is far more fearsome, yet another dark lord who uses the Bible as a tool of hate and fear rather than liberation and love.

But these lurches toward meaningfulness never get very far.  Depp and Ricci keep the laughs coming with their perfect balance between sincerity and irony.  Funniest of all is Christopher Walken, relishing his brief and silent appearances.  And the stereotypical Danny Elfman Burton-class-soundtrack (lots of chimes and choral stuff over the dark gothic dirge theme) is as much of a presence as any character, running though almost every frame of the film (but hardly an original work, calling up his signature chimes and choral effects over that dark Batman dirge.) 

Although not as dark as I anticipated, this is definitely an R-Rated Tim Burton film.  One word: blood.  The heads do indeed roll.  And bounce.  And bleed.  But the violence is campy, exaggerated  for the sake of a shock, more in the vein of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure than Halloween.  Ray Park, who made such a great Darth Maul in Phantom Menace, is similarly menacing here, compensating with confidence and aggressiveness what he lacks in... well... a head.  Fortunately, Burton doesn't make this a splatter-fest, like I feared he would.  The horseman comes, he lops off heads, he leaves.  It's obvious that his appearance, bolting out of the fog on his black horse like an inevitable nightmare, was the image that compelled Burton to make this film.

Although many critics are taking turns using Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay for target practice, it's not a disaster.  The new story is suitable to the genre that it nearly spoofs, peppered with foreboding pronouncements of doom, hushed conspiracies to catch the crook, and sentimentally gooey romantic interludes.  Walker also wrote Seven and Fight Club.  He's at home in the verbiage of cops and serial killers in the big city, but here he strains to achieve the archaic dialect of the Irving world, and as a result there are no memorable voices. The cast basically have the job of divulging information between the action scenes, so we have enough story to provide structure.  The villain's inevitable tell-all speech is the film's one truly embarrassing low point; as loose ends are desperately tied up the film comes to a crashing halt and the enchantment is broken. 

I do agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum, to a point: "Beauty separated from meaning isn't nearly as likely to be as memorable as beauty arising from and commingling with a good story."  Of course.  But should we criticize the moviemaker for failing to deliver something he never intended to deliver?  "Beauty separated from meaning" is as fascinating to Burton as heads separated from bodies.  It's pure and... forgive me... brainless fun. We don't get mad at kids for playing with their toys; in fact, sometimes we join them.  Why be hard on Burton? 

Ultimately, Sleepy Hollow is an elaborate Halloween party, where everybody gets to ham it up.  It's the kind of movie Beetlejuice or Jack Skellington would have felt right at home in. Critic Michael Atkinson puts it best: "Every shot of Sleepy Hollow is a box of candy sent directly to every Boomer brat who ever spent a Saturday watching old horror movies on local TV, reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, or assembling an Aurora monster model."  Burton is indeed the Willy Wonka of campy horror.  He'll never win a director's Oscar, but we owe him credit for providing some of our most enthralling visual fantasies. 

And as for those who gripe about the lack of nourishment in their dessert... well... I'm tempted to make some jab about how they've lost their heads.

Jeffrey Overstreet 11/30/99