Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is no longer a geeky schoolteacher, as in Washington Irving’s famous story, but a geeky detective. Early in the movie, Crane annoys his superiors in New York City so thoroughly that they dispatch him to the countryside, where three noggins were recently lopped off “clean as dandelion heads.” Once in Sleepy Hollow, Crane first hears the legend of the Headless Horseman (Christopher Walken), which is re-enacted in a ravishing, wintry flashback. It’s said that a Hessian soldier was decapitated during the Revolution and now prowls the earth returning the favor. Crane champions reason and science above all else, and dismisses the Horseman legend as superstition. Then he sees the demon in action. Soon Crane is chasing the Hessian, as well as a young beauty named Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci). The thought of catching either makes him tremble.
Depp’s performance here is highly mannered and takes getting used to, but ultimately he makes Crane funny and human. How many movie heroes respond to danger by shoving the nearest woman or child in front of them? Ricci, by contrast, is so-so. Her courtship of Crane is touching, nonetheless, and their faces are luminous together in close-ups–they look like two passing planets. Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”) is credited with the wry, sparkling screenplay here. But there’s no mistaking the brittle humor of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who reportedly ghost-wrote a draft. Toward the end of the movie, Crane and an orphan named Young Masbath (a very fine Marc Pickering) battle the Horseman atop a windmill that calls Burton’s “Batman” movies to mind. Afterward Young Masbath asks, “Is he dead?” “That’s the trouble,” says Crane. “He was dead to begin with.”
What slows “Sleepy Hollow” down is the dull, byzantine search for the mortal who is somehow controlling the Horseman. Do we really need a conspiracy-type plot to explain the Horseman’s killings? He has no head, and he’s pissed about it–surely that’s enough. (One of Burton’s rare false steps visually is some lame Freudian imagery meant to evoke castration and the fear of sex. The Headless Horseman travels between upstate New York and hell by plunging in and out of a hole in a tree that looks like–well, like one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, to put it mildly.) It’s not until the end that “Sleepy Hollow” really begins to hurtle along, that it’s as much a visceral experience as an esthetic one. Ultimately, it may not be as quirky and unforgettable as some of Burton’s earlier movies–it lacks the sort of magical dust that settled over “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.” Still, at its best it’s a marvel: bold, exciting and full of visions.
