Not the best film from the greatest director we have, but still towers above everything else.(possible spoiler)

Rating: 6/10 (12 January 2000)

Richer than it appears on a surface level, this is still a bit disappointing from the director who gave us the greatest film of the last 20 years. It is not immediately apparent what is lacking. Burton's visual style is as ravishing as ever, if not as expansive - sometimes it feels as if he is working on a smaller budget than usual. Part of the joy of Tim Burton is that, like you, he has seen the wonderful imaginative possibilities of Roger Corman and Hammer Horror foundered by a lack of money to see them through, and is determined to rectify this.
The muted Gothic of the dusks, the forests, the late-eighteenth century mansions and towns, the austere churches, the horses, the villagers, the public rites, are astonishingly evocative, much more so that the rather perfunctory special effects. Even better are the stunning dream sequences - a mixture of gleaming white, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS-like pastel and emotion, snatches of lurid red, dream and violence - that are among the best things Burton has done.
The actors have been criticised for favouring caricature over character, but people forget that what made the figure of Edward Scissorhands, say, so moving was not Johnny Depp's performance, which, if taken in isolation, was rather stiff and unyielding, but Burton's visualisation of Edward's emotional subjectivity, like a great melodramatic director, though colour, composition, set design, and camera movement. The failure is not Depp's performance, which is often amusing, but Burton's inability to anchor it expressively.
SLEEPY HOLLOW is quite brilliant at undermining its surface narrative. Washington Irving's tale, and the book it derived from - 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon' - is often seen as the starting point of American literature, and cultural ideas about the notion of America, as it struggles to free itself from the dead weight of Europe. Burton's film, 200 years on, has the opposite vantage point, at the end of these notions: he knows how they have developed, and what they have led to. He has also open to him tools never available to Irving: e.g. Freud, Lacan, Derrida etc.
So, on one level, the film deconstructs the creation of American history, dramatising a prosperous, seemingly self-made, professional nation at the mercy of both the returning repressed, and the unbreakable codes of Europe. This is seen most clearly in its treatment of women, in the obscene gap between Ideality and reality. The only unadulteratedly positive female in the film is a murdered dream figure. Crane is quick to demonise Katrina as a witch whenever he can't rationalise a problem; ditto Lady Van Tassel, whose grievances are just, and whose oppression is firmly rooted in European feudalism.
This demonising can be seen as the fruit of Crane's movement from scientific rationalist into a supposedly religious society riddled with pagan superstition and fear. The move to America from Europe has only resulted in the transplanting of the old Ideas - the murders concern either land or sex. And yet, paradoxically, it is the conservative entity of the family that suffers most, representing the conventional society Lady Van Tassel wreaks merry havoc on.
One of the film's dominant metaphors is that of seeing, perception. Crane is a scientific detective (a lovely joke: the man who earns his living using his head investigating the Headless Horseman), arrives in Sleepy Hollow with new-fangled, self-created tools which include elaborate machines for improving what he sees. This allows for greater accuracy in studying the dead, the past, but as the legends of Sleepy Hollow begin to prey on his mind, allied with the demons of his own past, Crane becomes less able to see with scientific detachment.
With all the scenes of Crane in bed, and the attendant implications of dreaming and madness, as well as an increased hysteria in the action, the status of what we see - is it truth, or just Crane's colouring of reality - is called into question, making even more ambiguous Irving's rather facile ironies. Burton makes sure not to show us the murderer at the beginning: it doesn't materialise until Crane has heard the legend.
This ambiguity is largely achieved by completely changing the character of Ichabod Crane, a teacher in the tale, not a detective; someone who passes on tradition and learning rather than uncovering it; someone so susceptible to the supernatural that he actively seeks it out, both by studying it, and by listening to old wives' tales. Irving's Crane is far from a hero: physically grotesque, cruel, sadistic, greedy, cowardly. Depp's Crane is more fastidious than a wuss. By using the figure whose role is to find, see and interpret, Burton is better able to undermine him.
What confirms the doubtfulness of what we see is Crane's Oedipal confusions, his idealisation of a mother, who was killed by a brute, bible-bashing husband; and Katrina, who is constantly linked to her - he rejects her when she refuses to be as passive and ideal as he would like, becoming an artist and director with her Evil Eye. The two women murdered have maternal association - the widow murdered with child, and the midwife: examples of fertility and corporeality that threaten the ideal.
For Crane is a virgin, and is terrified of real, sexual women - the profusion of blood squirted on him; the visual play of red and white; his only illusory ability to cage the bird (traditional emblem of female captivity), compounded by its red setting. Lady Von Tessel only becomes the villain after Crane sees her having illicit sex, her maiming herself both a Hester Prynne-like mark of her sexual sin, but also proof of her own sado-masochistic control of her body and sexuality.
This so offends Crane, and the new America he represents, that he must cast her out, link her to death and castration (the Headless Horseman), to perversion of nature (the extraordinary Tree of the Dead, Munch-like in its harrowing grief). As with all his great films - BATMAN, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, ED WOOD, MARS ATTACKS! - Burton uses the perceived detritus of its popular culture to express profound disillusion with the nature of America. A brilliant, honorable failure.