Review of Sleepy Hollow

The year is 1799 and ''the millennium is almost upon us,'' according to the newly dashing Ichabod Crane played by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's enthusiastically bleak new movie. And speaking of dashing, when Ichabod gallops north from New York City, he rides up the west bank of the Hudson River although the village of Sleepy Hollow is on the east. But an ornate visual fantasy of Mr. Burton's can be expected to make its own rules, and ''Sleepy Hollow'' does that with macabre gusto. His idea of a beautiful day may be somebody else's nuclear winter, but Mr. Burton eagerly brings his visions of sugarplums to the screen.

So when it comes to appearances, this dark, shivery ''Sleepy Hollow'' manages to be as distinctively Burtonesque as ''Edward Scissorhands'' or ''Batman.'' Offering a serenely unrecognizable take on Washington Irving's story and its famously unlucky schoolteacher, the film brings its huge reserves of creativity to bear upon matters like the severing of heads. Quaint Dutch burghers of the Hudson Valley could have bowled ninepins throughout Rip Van Winkle's sleep-in with the supply of decapitated heads sent flying here, even if Mr. Burton handles such sequences with his own brand of wit. Shot 1: Sword approaches victim. Shot 2: Blood splashes Ichabod's glasses. Shot 3: Head rolls away. Shot 4: Body pitches forward. Pause for laugh.

History will recognize the rich imagination and secret tenderness of Mr. Burton's best films. (From a purely technical standpoint, as in the award-ready cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, this grimly voluptuous ''Sleepy Hollow'' must be one of them.) But it will also raise the question of what we were smoking during this period of infatuation with grisliness on screen. It is not unreasonable to admire Mr. Burton immensely without wanting to peer at the exposed brain stems of his characters, but ''Sleepy Hollow'' leaves no choice. As written by Andrew Kevin Walker, who took off Gwyneth Paltrow's head in ''Seven'' and apparently considered that small potatoes, ''Sleepy Hollow'' turns the tale of the Headless Horseman into the pre-tabloid story of a rampaging serial killer.

There are reasons to be troubled by this, and they aren't about squeamishness. Mr. Walker's credits also include ''Fight Club,'' a genuinely daring effort to make sense of the violent impulses of buttoned-down young men, and to plumb those dangers found at the nexus of popular culture and political fanaticism. That, at least, had the hallmarks of something different, and it involved a much lower body count than the one racked up by the Headless Horseman. But ''Sleepy Hollow,'' in the guise of an exotic fable and horror-film homage, offers little such ballast. For all its visual cleverness, it's much more conventionally conceived than Mr. Burton's admirers would expect.

Even birds nesting in one of the film's vast, wintry indoor sets found themselves trying to get away, moving into the only blossom-filled backdrop that ''Sleepy Hollow'' uses (for brief fantasy scenes). But the bulk of the film unfolds in a forbidding, fairy-tale village and forest that are as ambitious as the Gotham City of ''Batman.'' It is here that Ichabod, who now has a faintly English accent and Mr. Depp's playful charisma, is sent to solve a series of murders and to find that everyone in Sleepy Hollow looks mildly suspect. It is also here that he learns of the vengeful headless Hessian (Christopher Walken in redundant fright makeup) who is the town's main tourist attraction.

Using a color palette more often associated with stories of the gulag, ''Sleepy Hollow'' creates a landscape so daunting that even a large tree bleeds. At moments like the one revealing the tree's bloody secret, and in a couple of incidents involving witchcraft, Mr. Burton's film delivers a scare or two, but most of it is too tongue in cheek for that. As this film's Ichabod conducts a Holmesian murder investigation and even unearths a village conspiracy, he has much better luck with Katrina Van Tassel than any traditional Ichabod ever did. Katrina is played photogenically by Christina Ricci, who gets through the film gamely while remaining very much a sardonic creature of her own time.

An impressive cast shows off Colleen Atwood's sumptuous costumes and delivers dialogue, some apparently worked on by Tom Stoppard, sometimes graced with a clever edge. Miranda Richardson swishes dangerously through the proceedings as Katrina's obviously wicked stepmother, while the town elders include Michael Gough, Michael Gambon and Jeffrey Jones. The horror patriarch Christopher Lee is here, as well he ought to be. And Marc Pickering plays the teenage sidekick whom Ichabod cautions, as he might the audience, with ''I hope you have a strong stomach.''

Among the many scenes of cheeky mayhem, one finds a little boy cowering beneath floorboards while the Horseman harvests the heads of his parents. In case you were thinking of taking the children.
NYT