Sleepy Hollow (1999; directed by Tim Burton)
The fog swirls, the scenery is gray and dank, the backgrounds all look painted, the Danny Elfman music swells and I settled back, realizing how much I was looking forward to seeing a new Tim Burton movie. There's nothing else exactly like it, that's for sure.
Johnny Depp plays New York City Constable Ichabod Crane, who is attempting to be a scientific detective in 1799, a century before Sherlock Holmes. For his presumption in questioning his department's time-honored investigative techniques (torture and summary execution), he is sent to the tiny upstate town of Sleepy Hollow, where a headless horseman is decapitating the local gentry.
Crane is not really suited for this job. For one thing, he does not believe in the supernatural, which is a disadvantage when facing an adversary who's been dead for 20 years. For another thing, he's cowardly and squeamish. But intelligence and logic can be applied even to the undead, and this is what he does, in between fainting, cringing and cowering in his bed.
Depp is, as usual, tremendous. Christina Ricci plays his love interest, a local lass named Katrina van Tassel, who has a secret or two of her own. Ricci isn't a period actress, but this is Tim Burton not Merchant Ivory, so who cares. But Ichabod Crane is really this movie's intrepid hero and its timorous heroine all in one body, which doesn't leave much for Ricci to do. Besides, Burton isn't really interested in young love, he's interested in old character actors, and he's collected a terrific group here, including Martin Landau, Christopher Lee, Michael Gambon, Ian McDiarmid and Michael Gough. They are all in wigs and frock coats, and most are beheaded, quite graphically, before the movie is over.
There is an amazing amount of gooey sexual imagery, but of course no actual sex, though various bosoms do a good deal of heaving. Christopher Walken plays the headless horseman, making it probably the first time the character was more frightening with his head than without it.
With Johnny Depp: Dead Man, Ed Wood, Donnie Brasco, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
With Christina Ricci: The Ice Storm, The Opposite of Sex, Buffalo 66
With Martin Landau: Ed Wood