Oeuvre: Tim Burton - Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of my favorite short stories as a boy.  Likewise, the animated Disney short of the same name was in constant rotation around the Halloween season.  The chilling tale of the superstitious schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane and his mysterious meeting with the Headless Horsemen aroused my curiosity and fired up my imagination.

So, how does Tim Burton's film compare?  The movie, Sleepy Hollow, may have a streamlined title but it also has a far more complicated plot.

At the turn of the 19th century, man of science, Constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is sent to a small, Dutch village to investigate a series of brutal beheadings.  The townsfolk believe that the killer is not of flesh and blood, but a hessian from the Revolutionary War they call the Headless Horseman, who has risen and is on the hunt for fresh heads.  Determined to find the true culprit of these crimes, Ichabod uncovers a sinister conspiracy deep within the heart of Sleepy Hollow, and maybe even... beyond the grave.

Andrew Kevin Walker and make-up effects designer Kevin Yagher conceived of this adaptation as a period piece slasher film.  This comes as no surprise, given that Walker also wrote Se7en.

Johnny Depp performs ably as the capable but cowardly Ichabod Crane, now constable instead of school teacher.  Also considered for the role were Brad Pitt, Liam Neeson, and Daniel Day-Lewis.  Depp is slightly goofier than Neeson or DD Lewis might have been and maybe if the film had been closer to the source material, they would have been better choices.  Unsurprisingly, Depp wanted a prosthetic nose and ears to match the description of the character.  Equally unsurprisingly, the studio refused.  He gives a performance that's vaguely feminine and fragile and while he's far too pretty to fit in with the rest of his surroundings, its always fun to watch Depp swing for the fences.

Christina Ricci is cast as Katrina Van Tassel and she is given more development than her character ever had in the book.  And yet, there's still nothing to her character.  Its some sort of mathematical paradox in which zero is somehow greater than zero.  I suppose she spurns Ichabod later but that's about it.

Brom Bones (now named Brom Van Brunt) is Ichabod's romantic rival but his role in the story is chopped down immensely, if you'll pardon the pun.  Ichabod's first run-in with the Horseman and the chase to the bridge remains intact, and even contains one of the possible endings of the original story, but it appears around the halfway point of the film.  Apart from that Brom acts more as the Jock in a slasher film, than the Gaston-esque figure he is in the book.

Apart from that, we are given a whole new cast of characters.  Baltus Van Tassel, Magistrate Philipse, Doctor Lancaster, Reverend Steenwyck, Widow Winship, Notary Hardenbrook, all great names, are played by an embarrassingly talented cast including Michael Gambon, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Gough, Christopher Lee, and Miranda Richardson, most of whom play town elders and all of whom have something to hide.

Much is removed from Washington Irving's classic.  However, the tone of the film remains the same.  Eerie is the best word to describe it.  As I've said previously, the book is reshaped from a thrilling horror to a horror thriller.  My frustration at the changes aside, I have to concede that the film still works.  Burton turned this slasher film into a Hammer Horror film, even bringing in Hammer alumni such as Christopher Lee and Michael Gough.  The action and the kills are well shot and when the mystery really picks up, there is a modern energy that meshes well with the period setting.

"Their heads were not found severed..." warns Reverend Steenwyck, ominously.  "Their heads were not found at all."  There is a fantastic atmosphere that pervades most of this film.

The production design by Rick Heinrichs, from the imposing town halls, to the spindly scarecrows in a cornfield, to the twisted, dead tree in the middle of a forest are all straight out of what I like to call "horror by candlelight."  It all looks like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe novel.

The cinematography, shot by none other than the immeasurable Immanuel Lubezki is breathtaking and haunting.  His use of darkness and fog is classic horror the way it was meant to be seen.  Burton's frequent collaborator, Danny Elfman steps up to the plate in a big way.  Horror films are particularly difficult to write music for.  Low and ominous is an easy direction but its damn near impossible to make anything that stands out.  Almost any track would fit perfectly in a campfire setting.  He elevates the still and unnerving cinematography and provides a soundtrack that sends chills down your spine.

There is only one element of the movie I outright object to and that is the ending, which essentially amounts to a climb up a wind-mill (gotta milk that Dutch heritage for all it's worth) and a horse chase with the Headless Horseman.  Why does it bother me?  Well, I'll tell you.

SPOILERS FOR THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW BELOW!!!

The short story is COMPLETELY different!  In Washington Irving's original tale, Ichabod Crane is a lanky, gawky, superstitious schoolteacher who comes to Sleepy Hollow to... well... teach school.  Despite his awkward appearance, Ichabod is surprisingly charming and attracts the eye of every woman in town, including Katrina Van Tassel, a young woman and heir to her father's considerable fortune.  Ichabod also has an appetite and daydreams about wedding Katrina so that, when her father passes away, he can inherit the fortune and eat, and eat, and eat.

All of this becomes a point of contention to the local bully, Brom Bones, who also seeks Katrina's hand.  He attempts to embarrass Ichabod, though the pranks fail to dissuade him.

Then, on a cold, autumn night, Ichabod attends a party at the Van Tassel's.  There, Brom tells everyone the ghost story of the Headless Horseman, an evil spirit who lost his head and seeks others to take it's place.  He warns that if anyone sees this specter, they must make for the bridge next to the old burying ground, where the Horseman will disappear.

That night, on his lonely ride home, Ichabod sees a man in the distance on horseback.  The massive man approaches him and Crane sees that the man has no head.  The Horseman charges Ichabod and chases him through the forest, with Ichabod running for his life.  Ichabod crosses the bridge and watches in horror as the Headless Horseman crosses the bridge and throws a severed head at Ichabod's face.

The next day, Ichabod is gone.  All that remains is his horse, a trampled saddle, a hat, and a broken pumpkin.  Brom Bones marries Katrina.  Did Ichabod truly run into the Headless Horseman that night?  Was he dragged to hell?  Or was it merely Brom Bones in disguise?  And if it were, did Ichabod flee the city?  Or was he savagely murdered and his body hidden?  The true fate of Ichabod Crane remains a mystery.

The End.

To me, that ending is WAY scarier than any ferris wheel fight scene.  The idea that our hero could be dispatched and we'll never know the truth is frightening.  I suspect that as children, we all have a fear that we will be taken and nobody will know what happened to us.  I understand that a story about a schoolteacher and only one supposed murder can't sustain a feature film but I prefer this sinister and ambiguous conclusion.

Its the movie's lame ending and a tired, bland love story between Ichabod and Katrina, that prevent this movie from being a horror classic.  That said, I still think that its a lot of fun and if you're in the mood for something to watch on Halloween that has that October spirit, I think this is a fun film to check out.

Oeuvre: Tim Burton - Ed Wood

Ed Wood is Tim Burton's Schindler's List.  There.  I said it.

Lets dive right in, shall we?  In the early 50's, a young filmmaker named Ed struggles to make movies by any means necessary.  Undeterred by repeat failures, he is convinced his luck has changed when he meets the once great, now forgotten horror star, Bela Lugosi.  Together, the pair make some of the worst films of all time.

There are two types of Ed Wood fans; those who discovered his objectively terrible films on their own, and those who discovered him through this film.  Some are the former.  Most are the latter. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

The film shows considerable maturity for Burton.  Saddled with the responsibility of telling the story of a real person's life, Burton stays away from the stop-motion animation and gothic imagery that has defined his career up to this point.  Instead, he makes a film "the Ed Wood way."  The production design by Tom Duffield recreates Wood's reality in painstaking detail and the black and white cinematography by Stefan Czapsky captures it beautifully.  You're not just in Ed's world, you see it from his eyes.

They say we love characters for trying more than for their success.  Ed may be the poster child for that ideal.  The screenplay written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, based on the book by Rudolph Grey certainly thinks so.  We're always in Wood's corner.  We cringe as he gets knocked down and we cheer for him each and every time he gets back up.

The film boasts an impressive cast including Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray (who regrettably has never appeared in another Burton film) and a delightful cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio and Maurice LaMarche simultaneously as Orson Welles.

Martin Landau is magnetic as the foul-mouthed Hungarian.  His relationship with Ed, as they grow from idolized admiration to mutual appreciation, is tragically beautiful.  Both are striving for respect and legacy.  Wood, for a respect he has never achieved and Lugosi for a respect he once possessed.  Never meet your heroes, kids.

But the real star of the film is Johnny Depp as the titular Ed Wood in what may be the finest performance of his career (not counting Captain Jack in Pirates 1).  He imbues the character with delicate sensitivity.  He looks at everything and everyone with the energetic wonder of a child.  Watching Depp going over dailies of Lugosi stumbling through a scene, you'd think he was watching the second coming of Christ.  He has no self-critic, no voice in his head asking if what he's making is total shit.  He can't afford it.

Ed surrounds himself with failures, not to prop himself up, but because nobody of substance would agree to work with him.  They become his friends, compatriots, and accomplices as he passionately convinces them to steal giant, robotic squids and get baptized in a swimming pool.  And when Wood reveals himself as a transvestite, very risqué back then, they embrace him with loving arms, laughing with him.  They form a loyal circus group of badness that you want to join.

Ed Wood has had a hard time finding its crowd.  Its the film that most casual Tim Burton fans, I'm talking about the Hot Topic crowd here, seem to have missed.  Whereas, more serious cinefiles, those who stick up their noses at Batman or Sleepy Hollow, praise as his best.  Whichever way you look at it, whichever camp you find yourself in, its certainly a gem.

Under the care of almost any other director or written by any other screenwriter, this story could be nothing more than a series of potshots at the character but that's not the case here.  Sure, there are more than a few jabs at the hapless filmmaker and his crew, but at its heart, this is a story about determination and pursuit of one's dreams.  The film is never cruel.  Rather, its filled with admiration and respect for a man who was a terrible artist, but was still a man, with hopes and dreams, who made friends and watched people die.  He felt love and he felt heartache.  In that way, Ed Wood is one of the most human films I've ever seen.

Despite being critically well received and winning several Academy Awards, the film was a box office flop.  No accounting for taste, I suppose.  Check it out, immediately.

Oeuvre: Tim Burton - Edward Scissorhands

After the ground-shaking success of BATMAN, Tim Burton had free reign to do whatever he wanted. While some directors use their clout to make big budget, original movies that otherwise wouldn't have been made, (cough, Christopher Nolan, cough) Burton went small and personal, and so we have Edward Scissorhands.

You probably know the story of Edward Scissorhands by now. And if you don't, you at least recognize the unforgettable images or have heard Danny Elfman's equally unforgettable score.  A lonely inventor creates a man but dies before he can finish him, leaving the man with only scissors for hands.  When an innocent Avon lady accidentally discovers him, she brings him home to her small suburban neighborhood, where he becomes very popular among the bored townsfolk.

Johnny Depp makes his Burton debut as the titular Edward Scissorhands.  Known primarily as a teen heartthrob from 21 Jump Street and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Depp curls inward as the shy, misunderstood character. Depp speaks less than 170 words in the entire film and yet his performance is clear and touching.

Dianne Wiest plays Peg, a devoted wife and caring mother, but also a door-to-door makeup salesperson. In many ways, she is similar to Edward. She's optimistic and eternally kind despite being continually downtrodden and disrespected by her neighbors.  She is married to Alan Arkin, who could not be more All-American Dad if he tried.

In any love story, you need a love interest.  Kim, played by Winona Ryder is a girl next door type whose teenage attitude makes her fear Edward and reject him as a freak.  However, she has a good heart and a patient spirit like her mother and finds herself warming to him, much to the annoyance of her boyfriend Jim, played by Brat Pack alum,  Anthony Michael Hall.  He plays a jock who treats Edward like a child and pretends, in his own callous way, to be friends with him.

And finally, there is the lonely Inventor played by Vincent Price.  He is inspired to invent Edward while looking at a cookie baking machine of his own creation.  It's that kind of movie.  His role was expanded in the script, but Price was very old, and his battle with emphysema and Parkinson's meant that most of his scenes were cut.  Fittingly, the last scene he shot for the film, that of his death, would be the last thing Price would film in his life.  He passed away shortly thereafter but his role in this movie, however brief, is charming and endearing.

This may be the most Tim Burtony movie of all time.  It is the perfect confluence of his talents.  Once again, his American heritage mixes with his German influences, and while they merged smoothly in Batman, here they clash but they clash beautifully.  Edward Scissorhands exists in a reality slightly skewed from ours.  Peg's pink Avon uniform stands out vibrantly against the gothic castle.  Edward's pale skin and gravity defying hair make him stick out like a sore thumb amongst the clean cut "normal" people that surround him.  His contempt for the American suburbs is fully on display here as well.  The houses are painted in garish Easter pastels and all the men leave for work at exactly the same time, but there is also a scary, dark castle atop a scary, dark mountain that comes out of nowhere.  If it weren't for the fairy tale elements of this movie, one could argue it is riddled with plot holes and marred by dramatic simplicity but it totally works.  If you wonder where Edward gets the blocks of ice, you're asking the wrong questions.

One of the deeper, darker concepts this movie explores is our relationship with phenomena.  Edward is treated with admiration and curiosity but he's nothing more than a novelty to most of the town.  These people are terribly bored.  To them, he is something to gawk at, and when he doesn't behave the way they want him to, he's something to fear.  They are more than happy to believe that he is a thief, a sex offender, and even a murderer despite all evidence to the contrary.  Even Peg, the well-meaning mother, is corrupted by Edward's presence.  As Edward becomes more and more popular, she starts to use him as a means of increasing her social value.

In a deeply troubling scene, Peg sits with Kim and admits that she should never have brought Edward down from that castle.  That their lives would have been better if he had just stayed up there forever.  Its upsetting because even Peg, one of Edward's most passionate defenders, thinks its better for Edward to be locked away in desperately lonely isolation, instead of hoping that others will grow to acknowledge and love him as they do.  Its a dismissal of humanity's worth as a whole.

The only pure person in this movie isn't Edward, its the Inventor, a man who created life out of the emptiness in his heart.  Edward is a child and can be molded as one.  Left to his own devices, he cuts his face.  He hurts everything he touches but longs for human interaction.  His very first lines are "don't go."  He wants to understand the world around him and sees beauty everywhere, but even he is corrupted by the world he is forced to inhabit.  In our culture, he experiences desire and longing, but with it come jealousy and violence.  Edward, it seems, is not meant for this world.

It's impossible to separate the artist from the art in this case.  I'm not referring to Burton's fondness for vibrant colors, black blacks and pale makeup.  I'm referring to Edward as a character and Burton's childhood in Burbank.  At its core, the story is about a lonely young man, who doesn't understand people.  He becomes an artist and even achieves a small level of fame before being chased out of the town he never asked to be a part of.  Edward and Burton even look alike, with the same pale skin and trademark straggly hair.  This only contributes to the film's feeling of honesty.  There is something true about Edward Scissorhands and I think it's because its the most personal movie Tim Burton ever made.

What Burton creates here is a modern day fairy tale; the story of where snow comes from.  The film is intensely moving, thanks in no small part to Depp's performance and Elfman's score.  One scene in particular, in which Winona Ryder asks Edward to hold her always draws a tear from my eye.  Edward Scissorhands is a deeply beautiful, tragic love story that deserves to be seen by everybody. Its just that good.