Sleepy Hollow

46 out of 100

Dark, Gothic and macabre, Sleepy Hollow is director Tim Burton's retelling of the classic Washington Irving short story about a headless horseman who in 1799 roamed the countryside north of New York City, lopping off the heads of his victims and leaving behind gruesome corpses.  An interesting cast, nifty cinematography, authentic period costumes, and an ominous, atmospheric Danny Elfman score effectively recreate this spooky milieu, but the movie eventually sinks under internal contradictions and a lack of emotional depth.  

Johnny Depp is suitably intense and idealistic as Ichabod Crane, a young constable who rails against "medieval" justice and advocates scientific methods of crime solving. Crane is dispatched (or more likely banished) to Sleepy Hollow to investigate the string of bizarre murders.  Upon his arrival, the town elders relate the story of a Hessian mercenary (a snarling, ghoulish Christopher Walken) who was decapitated in battle 20 years before and now roams the countryside, leaving his victims in the same state.  Pragmatist and skeptic that he is, Crane learns there is more to the story; the horseman's victims all knew of foul play involving the coverup of a will by which a wealthy local resident disposed of his fortune.  Crane is something of a delicate hero, though. He is tormented by nightmares of horrors visited on him during his childhood and is disconcertingly cowed by some of the bloody goings-on, at times even fainting for a cheap laugh.  It's an aspect of his character that seems incongruous.

When he first arrives in Sleepy Hollow, Crane comes upon a party at an inn, where a young maiden, Katrina (Christina Ricci, now 19 years old and growing up nicely), kisses him in a blindfold parlor game.  Katrina comes to play a central role in the grisly plot, which involves many sanguine confrontations with the headless horseman, and she and Crane fall in love.  The relationship is not well developed, however, and leaves the viewer with little understanding of the attraction between the two.  But there's an even greater impediment to buying into this movie: Crane is a self-proclaimed champion of "sense and reason, cause and consequence," but the movie centers around supernatural special effects, like a "Tree of Death" that comes to life like a nest of snakes and bleeds when hacked, not to mention the headless horseman himself, who undergoes a spectacular transformation in the movie's climax.  So fantasy and reality coexist uneasily, and when the movie reaches its resolution, we don't really know which has triumphed. Judicious moviegoers will likely "be-headed" elsewhere this season.

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