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Can you imagine what it must have been like attending grade school with little Timmy Burton? Concerned teachers always scheduling parent conferences to display his morbid drawings and stories, the other children equally scornful and wary of his vaguely disquieting habits and appearance -- I’ll bet he came up with things for science projects and show-and-tell that made “The Addams Family” look like “The Partridge Family.” Luckily, he grew up in California rather than Utah, so instead of pulling him apart with horses, burning the pieces, and burying the ashes beneath a crossroads, his significant adults offered him counseling and a key to the medicine cabinet, both of which he politely declined.
Thank the gods of cinema. Normality’s loss is our gain.
In Sleepy Hollow, his first turn at directing since what some called the “disappointing” 1996 release Mars Attacks (which still did over $100 million boxoffice worldwide), Burton, who spent the interim working on the unmade Nicolas Cage Superman project, eschews the day-glo kitsch of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands for the gothic semitones of Batman and its first sequel. This retelling of the classic story by Washington Irving casts Burton regular Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, who instead of a timid schoolmaster is now a timid constable, dispatched -- exiled, actually -- upstate from New York City to investigate a series of grisly decapitations (as if there’s any other kind). There he finds a sunless, foggy burg straight out of the Hammer horror films that so heavily influenced the director’s artistic leanings.
Trouble is afoot in the little community -- make that, a-four-foot, as a monstrous headless horseman of local legend has reportedly been thundering about at will, depriving prominent citizens of their Dutch noggins. The townsfolk are convinced a bloodthirsty Hessian mercenary (played with mute abandon by Christopher Walken in a narrative aside) similarly beheaded in a nearby Revolutionary War skirmish 20 years earlier has returned to wreak vengeance, leaving Crane, an enthusiastic proponent of burgeoning 18th century science, to prove otherwise. But Ichabod has his own haunted past to contend with, as well as conflicting feelings for mysterious local lass Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci, looking both elfin and -- a trait not usually ascribed to elves -- characteristically voluptuous). And I’m not giving anything else away.
Though featuring several other Burton regulars -- Jeffrey Jones, Lisa Marie, Martin Landau, Michael Gough (who in addition to playing Batman’s butler Alfred was also in Hammer’s second big horror hit, 1958’s Horror of Dracula, which as its title character starred career count Christopher Lee, also given a cameo here), even a brief appearance by Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas -- and excellent sfx and stunt work (swordplay by Ray “Darth Maul” Park), the real star of Sleepy Hollow is the film’s overall look. Coming from an art school background, Burton has always made the design of his productions integral to the story. Though the plot bobs and weaves a bit, confusingly so at times, the costumes, set, decoration, and lighting work together as an organic whole to establish and maintain a gleefully macabre mood. The effect is something like wandering through a gallery of Edward Gorey paintings: you’re never quite sure if you should cross yourself, gather up the kids, and flee to Disneyworld, or have a picnic and soak up the atmosphere.
This would have been a great Halloween movie. B
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