For a bad film, very good indeed

Rating: 7/10 (28 May 2000)

It's better for a film to have good art direction than a good cast. Not that I want to begin by complaining about the cast. It's always a delight to lay eyes on Christina Ricci, all the old codgers of the town are very well done, and Johnny Depp is more or less tolerable role that appears to have been written with Rowan Atkinson in mind (it's a pity he wasn't available). But a good cast can't rescue a bad script, whereas good art direction, to some degree, can. And, to some degree, it does. This is a gorgeous, amazingly CONSISTENT looking film. Sleepy Hollow is not so much a town as a world. And the woods outside, and New York itself, belong to the very same world. There are one or two neat cinematic ideas: the two girls with the twigs, Christina Ricci's ambiguous white cloak ... actually, that's just two, but I wasn't taking notes.
But, too be honest, the visual ideas aren't THAT great. Look at this work next to a REAL masterwork of design and the difference is at once apparent. Many of Burton's images don't even justify themselves, let alone the narrative digressions they necessitate - such as the laboured, overwrought and irrelevant whodunnit. There's a limit, after all, to how many people can die in the attempt to prevent further deaths before it all becomes just too ridiculous, and that point is passed after an hour or so, with half the village still to die. I don't think I've ever seen so many corpses in a detective story. Furthermore the explanation given for Ichabod's so-called obsessions is the usual kind of childhood-rooted psycho-analytical rubbish, put in because the writers read somewhere that characters need `motivation' and didn't realise that THIS kind of motivation reduces a flesh-and-blood character to the status of a simple wind-up toy. All that guff about the poverty of reason which WE must endure because of Ichabod's childhood trauma is predicably trite. Basically this a confused film, at war with itself in too many ways for me to tell you them all. Let a single instance suffice. After all of Burton's effort and guile has given us a good Headless Horseman, he becomes just another guy on a horse in the chase scene towards the end. Ichabod actually pinches his horse! and a black denizen of Hell suddenly becomes as alarming as a spare bicycle.
I wasn't kidding earlier when I said that the poor script is - to a degree - rescued by art direction. It's refreshing to see a really-well crafted fantasy world, one that isn't just our own world in disguise. Of course it matters that what HAPPENS in this world isn't worth recounting, but strangely it doesn't matter as much as you might think.