Tim Burton
Sleepy Hollow

Tim Burton is THE director of the gothic fairy tale, with his usual gentle touch of magical melancholy that is also the basis of other films like 'Edward Scissorhands' and the collection of stories 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories'. In 1999, Burton decided to make a film based on a story by Washington Irving. The result is 'Sleepy Hollow'.

We are in puritan America of 1799. The investigator Ichabod Crane is sent to the village of Sleepy Hollow, north of New York, to solve a very complex case, which is quite incredible: three corpses have been found headless and everyone agrees that the culprit is a headless horseman, who has long terrorized the villagers, claiming his tribute of death, which consists in beheading his victims until his head is returned, which was cut off after he, a ruthless and bloodthirsty Hessian mercenary, was captured and killed to put an end to his massacres. But I don't want to dwell on the plot but rather on another point of the film that I consider fundamental.

The protagonist (an outstanding Johnny Depp who once again shows us the exact meaning of the expression 'psychological depth of characters') is very interesting because he shifts from initial positivism, from the absolute belief in the notions of cause and effect, to being overwhelmed by a series of events (love for Katrina-Christina Ricci- and the encounter-clash with the headless horseman) that will harshly confront him with the impossibility of reducing everything to strict rational analysis and will make him understand that logic cannot always provide an explanation for everything......

In conclusion, I wanted to focus my first 'ocular' review (and you can see...) precisely on my favorite film, and it is so based on what I, as a budding cinephile, have defined as 'the two S canon': Screenplay and Scenography. As for the scenography, we know well that, being a Tim Burton film, we are faced with dark, yet at times enchanting settings, so much so that the eye remains amazed but irresistibly fascinated. Regarding the screenplay for this film, its strength is, in my opinion, the constant reiteration of the dichotomous element: throughout the film, we find the clash between good and evil (embodied on one side by white magic, the 'good' kind, so to speak, of Katrina and by the witchcraft of her stepmother on the other), as well as the already mentioned one between rationality and esotericism, between reason and following the dictates of the heart and instincts, an antithesis that, by association of ideas, produces another, that between the 1700s and 1800s, between the century of Enlightenment on one side and that of Romanticism on the other.