Somehow I've become a dude who has watched four or five different adaptations of Sleepy Hollow, now. A lot of them feel like they exist in the shadow of the stellar Disney short, but this one ends up something special.
It's much more a period piece. Harvard educated Ichabod Crane arrives at the podunk farm town of Sleepy Hollow. We're in the shadow of The Revolutionary War, and many of the older folk associate Ichabod's demeanor with that of the enemy. But they need a teacher and he's the only applicant. Even though the pay isn't to Ichabod's liking, he soon finds his education affords him a strange power over some folk in Sleepy Hollow, and thus everybody is forced to settle with what they're given, for better and worse.
I appreciate how genuinely three-dimensional these characters feel. Again, a lot of adaptations kind of exist in the simplicity of the Disney version, but here you really get the sense that everything is part of a larger tapestry. Katrina Van Tassel is planning for the future, which for Brom Bones means settling down and starting a family -- but Katrina wants to travel, something Ichabod taps into with his stories of far off lands he's read about in books. Everybody's got something going on.
Shoutouts to this movie also making the story of the Headless Horseman feel like a proper ghost story. A lot of them either go way too overboard with making the Horseman feel like this larger than life presence that dominates the whole story, or they just assume he's naturally scary on his own and don't do anything interesting with him. Here, the tale of the horseman is given just enough dues to make it creepy without casting its shadow over the whole movie. You know it's coming, you know this story, but our characters are given a lot of breathing room around the headless horseman to let it simmer in the background.
And, just, good performances, too. A lot of these folks aren't Academy Award winning actors or anything but they fill their roles very well. Rachelle Lefevre gives a great sassy bite to Katrina, Paul Lemelin's Brom Bones is a warm-hearted rogue. Brent Carver as Ichabod Crane channels that same kind of silly infatuation with "class" that you'd get out of Frasier and Niles Crane. He's a dork, but in a certain world, he is king of the dorks.
Really, though, this is a made-for-TV movie, and eventually that catches up with it in the end. Ichabod's ride home after Katrina's harvest party wants to be spooky, but its full of limp action and cheap effects.
It gets so close, but the flat ending really shakes how enjoyable the lead up is.
