Hack Attack

Tim Burton loses his head with Sleepy Hollow.

by Sam Adams

It’s not easy, giving up on an artist. Part of what keeps you going as a critic or fan is the belief that there are certain people you can depend on to keep things interesting. Not every work they turn out will be a masterpiece, but if their vision is honest and true, their most abject failures are born from the same impulses as their greatest triumphs and you have to experience the one in order to fully understand the other. Learn enough about an artist’s history and their continuing development becomes like a book that you can’t put down, each new work a chapter in a much larger saga. It’s why people put stock in the idea of "the new Robert Altman" or "the new Martin Amis" or "the new Elvis Costello" — without saying what it’s like or even whether or not it’s any good, if you’re a devotee, you know you have to check it out.

Once you’ve granted an artist entry into the pantheon, it’s difficult to dislodge them, and some people never tire of making excuses for a once-great artist. (After a decade of mediocrity, I’m only just coming to terms with the fact that Costello will probably never make another great album.) But love affairs do end; your passion can wane, or it can be killed.

All this is a long way of saying I’ve stopped waiting for the next great Tim Burton film. Back before I knew an auteur from a sea lion, I was a teenager seeking out every one of Burton’s live-action features in movie theaters. I can’t say I loved all of them but Burton seemed to bring a unique vision to the screen, part fairy tale, part funhouse mirror. And when he could turn out a movie as warped, as funny, as magical as Ed Wood, who cared if he slipped up from time to time?

Burton seemed to bring a unique vision to the screen, part fairy tale, part funhouse mirror.

The thing is, Sleepy Hollow isn’t a slip-up. Burton followed the lauded but mostly unwatched Ed Wood with the dreadful Mars Attacks!, a grossly excessive waste that stands as one of the most gargantuan ego trips ever committed to celluloid. Apart from the bizarre quacking noise the diminutive aliens made as they gleefully incinerated most of humanity, there was nothing of the Burton we’d come to know — except maybe there was. Just as you look back on a failed relationship and wonder what you ever saw in the other person, I started reconsidering Burton’s oeuvre. Sure, Peewee’s Big Adventure and Ed Wood were great, but apart from that? Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman slink and Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice freakout aside, Burton’s other movies contain few single memorable performances; take away his trademark visuals — often more notable for scope than imagination — and you’re left with a whole lotta nothin’. Things were starting to look pretty ugly the morning after.

Sleepy Hollow clinches the deal. Only complete dramatic deafness could have allowed Burton to submit to a script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, 8mm), which recasts Ichabod Crane as a Manhattan constable sent to investigate a string of murders in an upstate farming village. Despite a substantial (uncredited) polish by Tom Stoppard and Johnny Depp’s daffy blend of scientific intrepidity and effeminate cowardice, it remains a remarkably stupid and, here’s the kicker, unimaginative way to flesh out Washington Irving’s story. Burton’s supposed to be Hollywood’s crown prince of daydreams, but Sleepy Hollow is all too depressingly like a cookie-cutter Hollywood thriller with a few desperate fillips. In its best moments, Sleepy Hollow seems to be actively mocking its own screenplay, as Depp is constantly squirted with thick, gooey blood like a vaudeville clown getting a face full of seltzer. But rather than taking a substandard script and making fun of it, wouldn’t it have made more sense to, I don’t know, try for a decent one? Apparently not.

Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks! aren’t the work of an artist who has taken a wrong turn. They’re hackwork, pure and simple. Apart from a brief dream sequence which nods to The Shining and Dario Argento — tellingly dialogue-less, and thus freest from the script — Sleepy Hollow is devoid of anything that couldn’t have been done by a well-trained film school grad assigned to copy Burton’s style. When people call Sleepy Hollow "the new Tim Burton," they’re not just referring to the film. They’re talking about the director as well, one who’s severed all ties with his older, more inventive self.