"HOLLOW" SUBSTANTIVE

          The 1999 Gothic classic directed by Tim Burton loosely adapted from the now nearly two hundred year-old story by Washington Irving.
          Johnny Depp stars as Constable Ichabod Crane.
          Wha-at?
          That's right, he's a peace officer with limited authority, not a school teacher with ultimate authority at all. Sent from New York City to the backwoods Dutch community of Sleepy Hollow by none other than Christopher Lee himself to investigate in his Angela Lansbury way a series of mysterious beheadings, Crane uses reason and logic to find that the killer is...a headless specter.
          The first film version of Irving's story appeared in 1922 starring Will Rogers as Crane. In 1934, Ub Iwerks, who co-created Mickey Mouse with Walt Disney, animated "The Headless Horseman," and later helped Disney with the 1949 cartoon "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Other versions of the story have been filmed--Jeff Goldblum plays the gangly country schoolmaster in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and there was a recent TV show ripoff which fortunately was cancelled--but the 1999 vision from the director of Beetlejuice takes, if not the proverbial cake, then at least the pumpkin pie.
          That said, a plethora of differences between Sleepy Hollow and the story by America's first man of letters wildly abound. Remaining intentionally vague to preserve the experience, suffice to say whereas Irving leans toward the Ann Radcliffe school of Gothicism which explains away the supernatural, Burton takes his instruction from Matthew "Monk" Lewis, meaning that supernatural elements are exactly that, and not to be explained in any other way at all.
          Even with marbled humor, it's still one of Burton's most "hardcore"-type movies. Featuring mouthwatering photography (largely of a totally artificial man-made forest) and an equally dark soundtrack composed by Danny Elfman, Sleepy Hollow is chalk-full of decapitations perpetrated by the ghost of a German mercenary.
          Two actors play the Headless Hessian: Christopher Walken and Ray Park. The former appears when we need to see the Hessian with a head (as in flashbacks, for example); the latter (Darth Maul in Star Wars - The Phantom Menace) fills the headless boots the rest of the time.
          To play the role, Ray Park may well have been literally murdered by Tim Burton himself as Park slept in order to secure an authentic performance, with promises paid to Park's deadly spirit that his head would be returned to his body upon completion of the film so that he could still have a few roles in death.
          Washington Irving's story--which originally appeared in his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.--concerns the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Dutch farmer who uses the nerdy Crane to make the town rowdy jealous. Burton's film downplays that, manufacturing instead the aforementioned mystery. And the resulting story, which emphatically does not exceed the timeless source material, nonetheless strikes all the right autumnal notes.


SLEEPY HOLLOW
Starring Johnny Depp,
Christina Ricci,
Miranda Richardson,
Christopher Walken,
Ray Park,
Christopher Lee,
Michael Gambon,
Casper Van Dien,
Michael Gough
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Andrew Kevin Walker, Kevin Yagher
Based on the story by Washington Irving
Runtime 105 minutes
Rated R


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE