Misses an opportunity, but not bad

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2000)

I sometimes feel that Tim Burton's luscious visual style comes at the expense of substance. I could be wrong, but my sense is that in Sleepy Hollow Burton took what might have been a very intelligent script about a rational man of the Enlightenment coming face-to-face with living proof of the supernatural, and he merely played that aspect up for laughs, and for camp (as with Ichabod Crane's bizarrely fantastical portable crime lab). Also, to the degree that this was about a rational man confronting the irrational, Burton's depiction of 1799 as a time of transition from brooding medieval darkness (symbolized by the prison and the smokey New York skyline) to an Age of Reason (symbolized by the proto-Victorian "White City" at the very end) is questionable, narratively as well as historically. Reason lost a battle simply by discovering that unreason exists, and was able to conquer the supernatural only with the aid of the irrational--i.e., love and witch's charms. That being said, it wasn't a bad movie at all--a visual treat, and a nice homage to one of the best old American fairy tales.