Tim burton

In Burton’s loose, highly stylized re-imagining of Washington Irving’s “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) isn’t a knobby,
awkward schoolteacher but a constable who’s prone to rather
dignified-looking bumbling. The story opens in 1799 New York: Ichabod has
been assigned to investigate a number of horrific murders upstate, in which
people’s heads have been lopped off (with a fire-hot sword, no less) by the
Headless Horseman. The Horseman was formerly a ruthless Hessian mercenary
(played in the flashback sequences by a deliciously deranged Christopher
Walken) who’d been beheaded and plopped into a sloppy grave by
Revolutionary War soldiers, and who now haunts the nearby wood doing his
dirty work.

Crane — who keeps his painfully obvious observations in a beautifully
illustrated and calligraphic book, a symbol of his yearning to mask his
inadequacies with pure style — doubts that the Headless Horseman is really
a ghost and begins to suspect that the town elders are somehow involved.
Meanwhile, he also faces recurring nightmares based on his own childhood
trauma, as well as a burgeoning attraction to a young woman of the town,
Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), who dabbles in witchcraft.

Depp isn’t Irving’s Ichabod Crane, but it hardly matters. With his
translucent, silent-film-star skin and lovely hollowed cheeks, this Ichabod
is a tortured, if not terribly bright, goth dreamboat. Depp gives even his
awkward, clueless stabs at scientific observations an almost debonair
quality. And the way he hides behind his young friend and helper (Marc
Pickering) in times of terror plays up his endearing fragility. Depp’s wit
and cunning are nicely understated here, lurking just beneath his somber
black topcoats and high, winged collars. His stammering and fake-confident
strutting give the movie just a touch of brightness, without disturbing its
brooding undertones.

Ricci suits Depp nicely as the inscrutable and luscious Katrina: she’s both
a quiet sexpot, capable of ruffling the rather straitlaced Ichabod’s
feathers, and a mysteriously calming presence. (In one scene, she meets
Ichabod in the wood, astride a white horse and draped in a white cloak
embroidered with red roses; the sight of her is simply breathtaking.)
Miranda Richardson as Lady Van Tassel, Katrina’s stepmother, is crisply
enjoyable, and her bald-eyebrowed look alone is a source of weird
fascination. Burton has a knack for choosing the right look for each
character — think of the way the bruised-looking, sleepless-night eye
makeup Depp wore in “Edward Scissorhands” seemed to underscore the
character’s essential conscientiousness — and he uses those skills
beautifully here.

Burton also has a keen eye for casting. As the town elders, Michael Gambon,
Richard Griffiths, Jeffrey Jones and Michael Gough all have that perfect
look of depraved authority. And in a witty homage to Hammer horror films, he’s cast Christopher Lee as a stonily severe judge.

The plot falls short on discernible logic now and then, but that’s hardly
an issue. “Sleepy Hollow” is all about visuals, music and mood, about being
swept away by what’s on the screen. Danny Elfman’s music is haunting and
jaggedly elegiac, the perfect underpinning to the movie’s look.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki brushes nearly every frame with a bluish
cast: This Sleepy Hollow is a wonderland of misty coolness, of horizons
defined by craggy trees, of shaded woods holding tight to their secrets.
The Horseman himself is a magnificent and horrifying creature, galloping
out from the maw of nowhere, his sword brandished like a warrior’s spear,
his cape floating around him like malevolent squid ink.

And since this is a Tim Burton movie, it only figures that latent childhood
fears should figure prominently. “Sleepy Hollow” has an R rating, although
the cartoonishly grisly flying heads aren’t particularly distressing (and
overall, the movie is nothing like its mean-spirited predecessor “Mars
Attacks”). What makes “Sleepy Hollow” so adult and finally so indelible is
the gorgeous, spellbinding quality of its nightmare visions; these
terrifying dreams are imbued with an almost tranquilizing beauty. A
youthful mother lights a revolving lantern for her young son, sending
visions of witches on brooms and spooky goblins swirling around the walls.
Yet the sequence isn’t played for creeps — if anything, there’s more a
sense of wonder to it than anything. Ichabod’s visions of his own beautiful
young mother are softly shaded, shimmery, tinted with vaguely erotic
undertones like those old-fashioned hand-colored photographs. She whirls in
a garden, her dress fanning out like a pinwheel of water around her,
calling his name. The delight in the child Ichabod’s eyes as he watches her
is so complete that you know for sure he’s going to lose her — and he does.

But Burton is possessed of an extremely delicate touch. While I wouldn’t
recommend “Sleepy Hollow” for kids, I wouldn’t hesitate to vouch for
Burton’s integrity in terms of the way he deals with the fears of his
adult audience. So much of the movie is lovingly devoted to those
fears. Burton doesn’t play them cheaply, or to grab at heartstrings;
instead he lavishes tenderness on them.

Children don’t need to have their fears examined (plenty of time for that in adulthood). But grown-ups, busy living life, making money and raising kids of their own, tend to make the mistake of coddling their inner child, if they pay any attention to it at all. In “Sleepy Hollow,” Burton sees the inner child as a small adult, like the ones you find in 18th century American primitive paintings, earnest toddlers wearing tragically grown-up clothes while clutching kittens or toy hoops. It’s a way of conferring respect and a kind of dignity on the spiritual life of children, instead of treating it as something sweet and simple and eventually outgrown. Burton keeps in direct contact with it himself, and for the rest of us, he’s an able guide. The other side of the looking glass lies just beyond his camera lens. All we have to do is keep awake — and step through.

But I found myself trying so hard to like “Alice in Wonderland” that the process of watching it exhausted me. Burton, working from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, isn’t even attempting a faithful adaptation of Lewis Carroll, and that’s probably a wise move. Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” — coupled with its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass” — is a marvel of dream-logic storytelling, a perfect articulation of the way our minds reinvent the rules of life during sleep: Carroll — or the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, if you prefer — understood how a conversation with a rabbit in a waistcoat can be a matter of life and death while you’re dreaming it and seem like a silly, dismissible trifle once you’re up and awake. Carroll’s books have a beautiful structure, but a movie needs more narrative drive, and Burton and Woolverton seem to know that. They’ve framed their story as a sort-of sequel, in which Alice (played by the ethereal-looking Mia Wasikowska) is now grown-up enough to be betrothed, and she needs to make a good match owing to her family’s constrained financial situation. The problem is, she doesn’t much like the husband who’s been chosen for her. And so, when the prospective groom puts her on the spot by asking publicly for her hand in marriage, she slips away from the gawking crowd and escapes — from him and from the responsibilities of adulthood — by tumbling into a rabbit hole.

In Burton’s vision, that world isn’t “Wonderland,” but “Underland,” a mildly witty play on words that makes sense in the context of his reimagining of the story (though, apparently, when you’re making a movie for the Walt Disney Co., it would be messing too much with tradition to call it “Alice in Underland”). In that world, Alice meets the cast of characters so familiar from Carroll’s book, although they generally serve different purposes here. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a sensitive, wild-eyed, gap-toothed scatterbrain who hasn’t been the same since the benevolent yet frightening-looking White Queen (Anne Hathaway) was dethroned by her power-mad and very big-headed (literally and figuratively) sister, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). The Red Queen rules her kingdom with a tiny iron fist: Her chief henchman is Stayne, Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover, borrowing a page from Laurence Olivier’s film version of Richard III, a spindly, black-clad figure with a charred, corrupted soul). The Red Queen takes pleasure in cutting off people’s heads, willy-nilly; she likes to rest her feet on the backs of fat, ottoman-shaped pigs. In short, she’s not a very nice person at all.

Alice, who is alternately too big or too small depending on what she’s most recently had to eat or drink, moves through this strange world — one in which giant, jewel-toned toadstools sport furry spots and, curiouser and curiouser, hookah-puffing caterpillars sound just like Alan Rickman — with a mixture of trepidation and sure-footedness. She’s been transported to Underland for a reason, and although she doesn’t yet know what that is, we of course can see it coming a mile away.

Foreseeing the ending of a story isn’t necessarily a problem; particularly in fairy tales, getting there is supposed to be most of the fun. But the problem with Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is that it’s all production design and no storytelling. There’s no compelling thread to follow here. Burton doesn’t build a universe in which we have any real reason to fear some characters and to feel protective of others. There’s nothing at stake in this Wonderland/Underland: When the action gets droopy, Burton cuts back to the Red Queen’s castle, where we get to watch her toddling about and spewing her highly amusing self-important twaddle. (Her silliest riffs are spun from the fact that she herself knows her head is enormous, and so what of it?) The Red Queen, as Carter plays her — her head has been enlarged and glued, via CGI, onto a twig-size body — is the most entertaining character here, and her makeup alone is both fascinating and repellent: Her lips have been painted into a tiny heart-shaped pout; her eyelids are coated with a magnificent color I can describe only as old-lady Maybelline blue.

But this tiny prima donna isn’t enough to carry a movie, and so Burton has to come up with activities to occupy the other characters. Depp, in particular, gets lost in the shuffle. The Mad Hatter, as Burton has reimagined him here, with a matted puff of red hair and perpetually dilated crazy-ass eyes, is something of a lost soul, the very type of character that Depp is generally so wonderful at playing. But it’s hard to see anything genuinely moving behind his tics and mannerisms. Even though Burton and Depp have done some wonderful work together — in movies like “Edward Scissorhands” and “Sleepy Hollow” — it’s gotten to the point where I prefer to see Depp in performances where he’s not hidden under “Look at me!” makeup. There’s a point at which perpetual collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor becomes a liability, and Depp and Burton may have reached it, at least for now.

“Alice in Wonderland” does offer its share of slender pleasures: Wasikowska plays Alice as bright and unassuming, and watching her is never a chore, even when the story devolves into a “Girls can do cool stuff, too!” empowerment tale. And the sequence in which she takes her first swig from that little bottle marked “Drink me!” — followed by her nibbling on that adorable “Eat me!” petit four — is ingeniously designed and staged, taking place in a warped-perspective room that appears to be all corners. Alice’s costuming here is particularly clever: She’s dressed in a billowy, translucent blue gown that she can both shrink out of and grow into. I also loved looking at, and listening to, the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry), a creature whose iridescent teal-blue stripes have been carefully coordinated with his enormous, glowing eyes.

But as lavish-looking as this “Alice in Wonderland” is, it still feels cobbled together, albeit painstakingly. It’s not at all shallow to care about the look of a film. Visual seduction is part of the reason we go to the movies. But maybe Burton is working too hard at being visually impressive: In the end, “Alice in Wonderland” comes off as manufactured instead of dreamy. Burton delivers all the wonder money can buy; what’s missing is the wonder it can’t.