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Sleepy Hollow
(****)
Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" seems to have been made solely for a man like Tim Burton to direct. Burton has an extraordinary visual imagination, and a flare for making unreal and bizarre seem somehow at home in the real world. From the first shots of the small village of Sleepy Hollow, we can see bizarre dark shots of the woods, of the landscape. None of it seems like it could possibly be real; a world in perpetual gloom. But it all seems to fit.
There are some very big differences between the original story and the 1999 film, of course. The Irving story isn't much longer than a dozen pages, and the movie fills a 2-hour time slot. The biggest difference here is in the character, Ichabod Crane (Depp). Here he is a New York detective who is pushing everyone to use scientific methods to solve crimes rather than old superstitions. We first meet him when he pulls a corpse out of the river, and objects when his superiors say the corpse must have drowned. Crane's reasons for relying on reason and logic are revealed later, and it is one of two secrets that I would not give away for all the tea in China.
His constant reliance on logic is a burden on his superiors, and finally the Burgomaster (cameo by Hammer horror star Christopher Lee) sends him to the small village of Sleepy Hollow, where someone has been lopping the heads off of its citizens. Indeed, an unaccredited cameo by Martin Landau makes that perfectly clear.
I mentioned Christopher Lee earlier; he isn't the only Hammer star here. In fact, the story itself isn't much more than a plot that would have been at home in a Hammer film. They were a great series of films, and Burton is paying homage here with his Hessian Horseman. Soon after entering Sleepy Hollow, Crane learns from Baltus Van Tassel (Gambon) that it isn't a man, and the heads were not ever found. They were "taken, taken back to hell."
There is no chance I would ever give the name of the actor who plays the Hessian horseman in the flesh; that is the other secret of the movie. But when you see it, it seems like no other choice could have been made. Burton's direction here is superb, the headless horseman on a giant black horse seems like it could have quite easily come from the fires of Hell.
Crane is aided by Katrina Van Tassel (Ricci, in a bland performance), daughter of Baltus. At first, his job is to find out who the horseman really is. However, reason and logic take leave and it becomes Crane's job to find out who is controlling the ghost of an angry Hessian.
If there are any flaws to be seen in this film, it would be in either Ricci or Casper van Dien. Neither comes out as particularly credible, or even livid. Depp's Ichabod Crane is great, but Crane never seems to care all that much about Katrina. Van Dien's Brom seems to be only there to be killed by the horseman; and I refuse to divulge how.
In the end, I don't think such a movie could have been realized by anyone other than a man like Tim Burton. It needed a man with a gift for the bizarre, eccentric, and visually imaginative. But it also needed someone with a reverence for the sources. It's not just what's new and different that keeps the movie going, it's also the homage to the old ways of horror.