Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton - Movie Review Example

Sleepy Hollow (1999 Directed by Tim Burton 2007 “Sleepy Hollow” directed by Tim Burton is based on the story by Washington Irving “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. The initial story and the film produced in 1999 have little in common. Though having borrowed the idea, the locus and names of the characters the authors of the script changed the plot wholly. What distinguishes Irving and Burton is their faith in the supernatural as something really existing, something that is around us. The supernatural is of magical character and is opposed to religion. Only selected individuals are able to penetrate into the world of the magic, study and implement it. The film that at first sight may seem a fairy tale reveals the director’s unusual, far from stereotypes point of view on the character of the supernatural. The plot of the film differs from that created by Irving. Whereas in Irving’s story the mysticism turns into a joke, everything is very serious in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. As we remember, the classical short story tells about Icabod Crane, a schoolmaster, looking like “a genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield”, a rather stupid and greedy person, who wants to marry Katrina Van Tassel, the only child of the richest man in the village, after seeing all the comforts that such a marriage promised. Katrina has another fan, Brom Van Brunt who is hale and hearty and is the leader of the local youth. And Brunt, not liking Icabod’s courting, decides to teach him a lesson. For this he makes use of two things: Icabod’s superstitions and cowardice and the legend of the headless horseman, a Hessian soldier who had been killed during the war and become a ghost, and who is roaming about in search of his chopped off head. Disguised, Brunt attacks Crane, on his way through the hollow. Crane is frightened to death and the next day he leaves the village and returns home to Connecticut. The story is full of humor and reveals the common sense and wit of the Dutch villagers rather than tries to make us horrified. It is not the same case with the film. Its genre is horror, thriller, fantasy, and it contains many episodes that make your heart sink. The very color scheme (the greatest part of the film is done in grey and blue tones) contributes to the feeling of the mystery. On the other hand, it also has some elements of the ironic detective. Burton’s Icabod is a young police officer (charming as all the characters of Johny Depp) who works for the police of New York. It is 1799, the last year of the eighteenth century, but the police use no modern methods of investigation. Icabod is the supporter of the innovations: he believes in the strength of the intelligent and logic, he invents some strange instruments designed to help in investigations. Not once he turns to the higher police officers with his revolutionary propositions, but his bosses are not willing to bother themselves. In order to get rid of the nuisance in the face of Icabod, they send him to Sleepy Hollow, to investigate strange murders taking place their. Three persons have been killed, their heads having been cut off. Icabod gathers his instruments and sets off to the village. As one could expect nobody is going to welcome the detective in the village. People here have their own customs; they are all related and have got their small secrets either. Only young and beautiful Katrina Van Tassel (performed by Christina Ricci), who is, like Irving’s character, is the only daughter of the richest man in the village (the embodiment of the American dream, having raised from the very bottom of the society to the highest position in it due to his industriousness and smartness), falls in love with him at first sight. Icabod is introduced into the case: it turns out that the victims’ heads have not been found, while Hessian Horseman has taken them instead of his own, which he can’t find. Crane is told the story of the Hessian Horseman: he was a violent and bloody soldier who came to America from Europe. Hessian regiment participated in the war because they were paid. It was different with this man: he liked to kill and the war was a wonderful opportunity for him to do it to his heart content (though, Christopher Walken, performing the bloody murderer makes the image of Horseman not horrible but rather funny). Icabod is frightened but continues to stick to his faith in the power of logic. The culprit is surely a man of flesh and blood, he claims. Even the events that follow do not disprove his beliefs, though they terrify him to death at first. After he meets the Horseman and witnesses one of the murders, Crane falls ill. He recovers and returns his self control with Katrina’s help. Crane finishes the investigation with the help of his deductive method, proving the strength of logic and sense. At that he starts treating everything “supernatural” as quite natural, though still feels rather frightened and often faints. According to the logic of horror tales the culprit is Katrina’s stepmother, who turns out to be an evil witch. Her motive is very banal: to revenge on Van Garrets and Van Tassels who became her family’s offenders (they deprived her family of shed and didn’t defend them when they were made to leave the village and live in the Western Forest) and to get all their money to herself. Taking into account that she coolly cuts off her sister’s head, she is thinking only of herself. So when the girl becomes a witness of the Hessian Horseman death, which also happened with her help, she strikes a bargain with the devil promising to give him her soul in case she gets the power over the Horseman. Later she digs out his head and this way gets a possibility to guide the ghost, directing him at her victims. As it could be expected, it leads her to death and hell: the Horseman takes her with him to the worse world. Tim Burton doesn’t seem to be a very religious person, but he is likely to believe in the “supernatural”. It is difficult to say whether he was going to convince the public of anything. They were likely simply to have a great desire to produce a great film – and they did it. However, the vision of the world offered by Tim Burton and his team is rather interesting and unusual for the film of that genre: the world is depicted as magical and “supernatural” in its nature (sorry for the tautology but it is appropriate here). Supernatural is always near and it is, in fact, rather ordinary; simply we don’t want or can’t see it. The events recounted in the film could be explained from this point of view, being associated with magic. The story chosen by Burton provided wonderful material for the kind of film he wanted to produce. First of all the locus of the events – Sleepy Hollow – is a marvelous place for the magic to work. This locus is opposed to the city of New York, which is the civilized part of the territory, where people have forgotten the art of magic, while the village is still close to the nature and people living here are able to perceive the voice of the supernatural reality. According to the classical short story, the village is situated in a “sequestered glen”, that got its name “from the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers”. The village saw hard times, and all the horrors of the civil war, and these terrors became basis for multiple legends. Irving describes the place as one that is still “under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie”. The inhabitants of the village “are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air”. And “the whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols”. Such a description is close to the American folklore horror tales and Gothic works. Thus, the isolation of the place and its close connection with the supernatural powers make the village a wonderful locus for the story Burton wanted to tell. The choice of the actors also underlines the initial idea of the director to show the world of the supernatural as one that really exists. Both Depp and Ricci are known for their numerous mysterious roles and their characters are always real, and seem to live nearby. This time they followed their type as well. Both Icabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel are marginal characters, belonging to the world of supernatural even more than to the physical one. Let us start with the life story of Icabod. His mother was “a child of nature”, who knew that the world isn’t what we see, it is much more. She seemed to know spells, and was able to communicate with the nature and spirits. Icabod had very close relationships with his mother and remembered her lessons. The woman was tortured to death by her husband, Icabod’s father, who was a fierce religious fanatic. Since then Icabod lost his belief in God, but not in magic – it is seen from many episodes in the film. When being told about Hessian Horseman for the first time, we realize that he is frightened. He sees strange nightmares that are obviously of magical character. He so quickly adjusts to the events taking place in Sleepy Hollow that one understands he is not a usual fellow. Moreover, he conducts his investigation, relying on logic (and not Holy Bible or religious doctrines), showing that magic has its logic too and he is acquainted with it since his childhood. At last in the end he marries Katrina, who’s doing her first steps in the art of magic, and whose mother was engaged in it too. As a result, by the end of the film, we, following the characters, start taking magic for granted. The evil witch, Lady Van Tassel, becomes an ordinary culprit who is to be punished. The marriage of Icabod and Katrina seems quite natural: two marginal characters, possessing some supernatural abilities, are going to lead a quite usual life in New York. The actors themselves make the events to be perceived as real and possible, as those that could have happened to your neighbors, a decent couple of Cranes. Lady Van Tassel made agreement with the devil so easily as if he was some businessman who could be called and fixed a meeting with any moment. The story seems to suggest that there exist people who have some particular qualities that allow them to communicate with the representatives of the world beyond its physical, revealed part. Magic is treated as a science. Katrina presents Icabod with the book on protective magic. It was her mother’s property and Katrina herself has studied it: she knows herbs that can cure and spells to defend the beloved people. Even in the church, during the attack of the Horseman she is engaged not into a pray but in drawing a pentacle with the evil eye, which is advised as the best way of protection in the book. Icabod finds some physical manifestations of the magical impact: the corps lost little blood, their vessels having closed at once, as if being burnt by a source of warmth unknown to people. When being wounded, Icabod quickly recovers though he would die of such a wound be it got in a usual way. At last Lady Van Tassel and her sister know that one should use some particular rituals to achieve the needed result. Her sister stays living in the wood, devoting her life to the science of magic. So while in Irving’s story the “supernatural” turns out to be a mere legend and is diverted into a joke of Brom Van Brunt over Icabod Crane, the film, vice versa, shows how the character returns to his perception of the supernatural as a given reality after many years of denying anything of that kind. It is a kind of return of the prodigal son to the world he left. There is a distinct moment of this return in the film: Icabod sees the nightmare in which he recollects what happened to him and his mother when he was seven. What is interesting, the nightmares start torturing him after Katrina draws the protective pentacle under his bed: it is the magic that returns his memory. Icabod wakes up and gets right into Katrina’s arms, she calms him and says that everything will be O.K. now (Icabod is back to the world of magic and this world greets him happily). Earlier in the film, during one of the first conversations between Katrina and Icabod, she tells him: “You can do a Magic.” She seems to mean: “you are one of us, you’ll have to recollect all and return to us”. So her actions can be interpreted also as initiation of a magus (a magus is a person who can communicate with spirits and comprehend their world and way of functioning – and that is just about Icabod as well as other marginal characters). Thus magic in the film is treated as something natural that can be perceived and learned by those who have reached a certain level of the development. Then the question arises concerning the role of religion. Traditionally, religion plays the main role in the films dealing with ghosts. And this time we have some usual requisites: the deal with the devil, the church as the place where the Horseman can’t penetrate, Lady Van Tassel taken to the hell, being punished for her evil deeds. In fact, religion is shown in the film as a feature belonging to human space, while magic is shown as the natural space to which people have to accustom and which they have to study. It cannot be good or bad – it is only a set of knowledge that can be used in different ways by people and depend wholly on people’s intentions, while religion starts bearing some negative traits. It is shown as unable to protect. Icabod’s father was a real devil incarnates hiding himself behind the religious views. Reverend Steenwick isn’t a pious person either (and it is on the condition that he lives in a small village in the eighteenth century) – he is lured by Lady Van Tassel and wants to give Baltus Van Tassel away to the Horseman in order to rescue his own life (quite out of Christian traditions). The cross that Magistrate Phillips wore didn’t save him from the Horseman. Katrina never prays – she uses magic, seeing it as more effective. Even the fact that the church is the place closed for the Horseman can be explained not by divine protection but, for example, by the presence of many magical things being on its territory, or by the fact that churches are built according to some magical formula (and it is so, simply we don’t connect it with magic) or that people having prayed for many years made this place magical (who knows how the magic works!). Religion usually proposes strict division into bad and good, where everything supernatural (especially witches) is treated as evil. According to this scheme both Icabod and Katrina are to be seen as associated with the devil, but they are definitely positive characters. Religion and magic offer different pictures of the world. While religion proposes the ready answers to all the questions and sticks labels on everything, magic makes to seek, provides you with the food for thought, opens new horizons of knowledge and feelings and makes you want to learn more about the world, to reject stereotypes and be ready for everything new. Magic makes those who learn it be creative. Magic is the way of maturating. Religion is available for everybody, while magic is for the selected ones, but it gives unique chances to get acquainted with the world we live in better. The film drew me to these conclusions. It should be mentioned that in this relation Burton is close to Washington Irving who perceived the world as one that must have been magical at least in some places. And the writer saw magic as an opportunity to increase human abilities. His story about Rip Van Winkle shows the variant of a successful development of events when the character experiences a wonderful adventure. He gets under charms, time having stopped for him, and returns to the human world many years later when everything is different (and his quarrelsome wife is dead). This is the world Tim Burton would like to live in. He embodies his dreams and his vision of the world in his films: Beetle Juice (1988) Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), Superman (1997), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Planet of the Apes (2001), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Corpse Bride (2005). The world of the films is always full of magic and all of them have created new dimensions of the reality. What is peculiar about most of Burton’s films is this very representation of the events and characters as really existing. They are so vivid and detailed that you can’t help perceiving them as not a mere fantasy but something that is possible. It explains the mad success of the films. The films offer us to peep into the world where the supernatural becomes a usual thing. To create such works it is necessary to see beyond the physical reality, to penetrate into the world of magic and grasp the principles of its functioning. Tim Burton’s films make you think of the world that could be better, they suggest that magic is possible and it can be done by each of us. At that neither director, nor actors try to thrust their opinion and vision on the audience. Everybody is free to see what he wants and to interpret the film in his own way. But the film is surely beyond the stereotypes and presents unusual understanding of the nature of the occult that have frightened the humanity for many centuries since the spread of the Christian religion in Europe. Before that people perceived the world as full of magic and knew how to implement this knowledge. Anyway, I would recommend the film to be seen (as well as the story to be read), while it is a real pleasure: actors’ playing, costumes, sceneries, director’s work, humor and horrifying episodes – everything is marvelous in this film. Read More