Feast for the eyes, snack for the brain

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2000)

Burton manages to capture some of look and whimsy of very best Hammer productions - including wrangling Christopher Lee for a small part - but his slick, overly precious take on the classic American gothic ghost story never manages to rise above its' own sense of good-naturedness to scare anyone over the age of reason. Thinly drawn characters, tedious narrative, and an overused monster conspire to bog down what should have been an easy sell. The legend has never been given the big budget treatment and the very idea of a headless horseman resonates as fresh as anything in the era still fascinated by hockey masks and chainsaws. Perhaps it is Burton's curse to forever whistle in the fog. Like a Magritte scene that is equal parts in darkness and light, the director cannot commit to absolute terror nor can he make a simple fairy story. Each extreme seems too maudlin, too lacking in irony. Take for example his drawing of Depp's Constable Crane. A nebbish man of reason in a haunted world. Since this is a popular motion picture you can rest assured that Crane's balloon is ripe for pricking from the get-go. But Burton is not satisfied to simply use Crane as a foil for comedy relief. He is shown at intervals to be a man of passion and, when called on, native courage. Depp probably deserves a great of the credit for this; he manages a degree of nuance when shifting from the priggish coward to the energetic crime fighter . Unfortunately, much of the rest of the cast is not accorded this freedom within the narrative to move about. Christina Ricci's white witch only hints at the beguiling seductress within the tight bodice while the four town elders who collectively make up the details of the central plot are as anonymous as the ubiquitous bloody neck stumps. Only Crane's boy assistant , played by Marc Pickering, really stands out in the supporting cast as he tranforms into a spot-on Dr. Watston to Depp's Holmes. The look of the film is stunning, perhaps the directors most completely realized visual accomplishment. Of special note are the opening and closing sequences in eighteenth century New York. I know others have noted this and perhaps Burton will return to it one day. The few minutes in this film are too brief. In small details, Sleepy Hollow comes on like a Cronenburg production with its fetish for sharp, suspicious tools, wounds, and places of crossing over - the vagina-like opening to hell at the 'tree of death' from which the horseman emerges. Of course, in Burtons hands these objects take on almost satirical proportions - like some in-joke within the popular avant guard of contemporary cinema.