Sleepy Hollow

Fans of Tim Burton's cartoon-cum-fable sensibility will not be disappointed with his latest ilm though I suspect those who have read the Washington Irving short story which provided the original text will find that too many liberties have been taken and its essence submerged by state-of-the-art cinema aesthetics, the latter courtesy of Coppola's American Zoetrope.

Burton's retro-Gothic vision is given full expression in this dark tale, the mise-en-scène shifting from simple dramatically-stark contrasts of pitiless authority to shrouded, mist-envelopped intimations of danger. The camera often sits low to the ground, accentuating menacing contrasts of size or swoops high to suggest an unnatural presence and there is, of course, Danny Elfman's portenteously foreboding score rumbling like an approaching avalanche throughout.

Much like Burton's masterpiece, Batman, the hero Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is on a mission to save good citizens from the evil of a sociopathic irrationality, whilst at the same time confronting his own demons.  And thereby lies the problem with the film and indeed so much of Burton's oeuvre - the pulverizing of the original source material in the same stylistic threshing machine. This means that whilst the production design and computer-generated effects are superb, dramatically there is little to sustain particularly because Burton insists on maintaining a juvenilely tongue-in-cheek spin on what should have been a genuine spooky tale. Most of the film is given over to the staging with the bulk of the narrative being shoe-horned into a lengthy expositional monologue given by the evil step-mother (Miranda Richardson) at the film's end.

The director's favourite male lead, Johnny Depp, with his Peter Pan good looks and slight frame is thoroughly unconvincing as the intrepid pursuer of the Horseman (played with gusto by Christopher Walken) his acting largely amounting to camp preciosity and a few facial tics. Christina Ricci (who Burton must have liked from her Addams Family role) is only slightly less appropriate as the damsel-in-distress. Despite its wonderful packaging (the film won an Oscar for art direction) Sleepy Hollow is pretty much what its title suggests.

 

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