After a dreary sojourn through several terrible films, director Tim Burton’s delightful new Beetlejuice joint proves that you can go home again.
Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. (Warner Bros. Pictures / Youtube)
It’s so good to have the old gang back again that it seems petty to carp about any aspect of this long-awaited Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reunion. Seventy-three-year-old Michael Keaton is still magnificent as the rampant undead “freelance bioexorcist,” and if he seems a shade slower and less electrically frenetic than in the delightful first Beetlejuice of thirty-five years ago, well, none of us are getting younger.
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, still wearing the Goth widow’s weeds and spiky bangs of her depressed teenage days, remains eerily loveable in perplexed middle age. Only now she’s a real widow troubled by her own alienated daughter, Astrid (the perfectly cast Jenna Ortega of Wednesday), as well as a career as a minor TV celebrity with a spirit-hunting show called Ghost House and a pushy TV producer boyfriend named Rory (Justin Theroux).
Lydia’s mother Delia Deetz (played by the divine Catherine O’Hara) is as daffy and self-centered as the ultrasuccessful conceptual artist she is now (“I am my art”) as she was when she was struggling to get noticed by the art establishment back in 1988. Recall in Beetlejuice when she raved at her mild-mannered, newly retired real estate developer husband, Charles (Jeffrey Jones), about their new house in “the sticks” of Winter River, Connecticut, in a voice rising gradually to a hair-raising scream: “I will live with you in this hellhole, but I must express myself. If you don’t let me gut this house and make it my own, I will go insane, and I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME!”
Charles is no longer with us (presumably because of Jeffrey Jones’s firm cancelation), and his funeral is the event that reunites the three matrilineal generations of the remaining Deetz family. A hilarious Claymation sequence illustrates the account of Charles’s comically grotesque death. An a cappella children’s choir sings the calypso song “Day-O,” so central to the charms of Beetlejuice ’88, at his grave site.
These refreshingly inspired bits show us that director Tim Burton is also back, after a long dreary sojourn through increasingly bad movies that have done so much to ruin his reputation as a filmmaker. In interviews, Burton has indicated that he identifies with one of the movie’s main themes: “Sometimes as an adult, you lose your way a little bit,” he said in one interview, “and then you have to kind of reconnect to yourself. So it became very personal and emotional to me.”
Burton got very creatively lost, but with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice he’s showing that you can go home again, reembracing the sweetly satirical approach once so evident in his films. In the Ronald Reagan–era 1980s, it was hard to beat American culture in awfulness. Burton’s fond embrace of occult oddity offered a life-giving alternative. Ghosts and vampires, witches and demons, the undead of all kinds, and a love of pop culture darkness offered relief for all of us isolated oddballs in a cruelly conformist culture.
His films embraced the tendencies of old-school TV entertainment that worked horror elements into friendly suburban and small-town TV comedies — shows like The Addams Family, Bewitched, and The Munsters. They all, quite unsubtly, presented little allegories of tolerance of racial, gender, and sexual difference which were heartening in the 1950s and ’60s, the era of the civil rights movement and its backlashes.
Burton’s movies emphasized a determined love of the communal quality of the “handmade.” His 1994 masterpiece Ed Wood was a celebration of outsiders in America finding a moviemaking community together based on the faded Dracula stardom of Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), overflowing with tenderness for their necessarily homely, rock-bottom low-budget films. This handmade aspect of Beetlejuice was considered a requirement of any sequel, Michael Keaton emphasized, the second rule right after the one about the Betelgeuse character having severely limited screen time:
I said, “Tim, If I ever do this again, I cannot be in it more than I was in the first one. Really, that would be a huge mistake.” He said, “I already know that.” I said, “And no. 2, it has to feel handmade like our first one — less, less, less, if any, technology.” And he was way ahead of me there. You almost want to see a little bit of plywood. You know what I mean?
In Beetlejuice ’88, crew members stuck their hands up inside the giant shrimp in bowls on the dinner table during the beloved “Day-O” demon possession number so they could grab the faces of Charles, Delia, and their guests after the last “daylight come and me wanna go home!” In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the song of the possessed is “MacArthur Park.” The number features a wedding party of free-form interpretive dancers as Betelgeuse and Lydia waltz up near the ceiling, quite plainly hauled up there by old-fashioned harnesses and wires.
There’s a bit too much plot in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Detours including Astrid’s mysterious new boyfriend Jeremy (Arthur Conti) and Betelgeuse’s vengeful ex-wife Delores (the ever-stunning Monica Bellucci) probably account for the occasionally slower place compared to the breezy Beetlejuice ’88. But even the extra characters and plot developments pay dividends, such as the wonderful bit about Betelgeuse’s past in plague-ridden medieval Spain, when he married Delores, which has him lapsing into occasional Spanish. And there are funny bits with Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe, who seem right at home in the Beetlejuice world.
For those who don’t quite get why this marvelous belated return to the world of Beetlejuice is a big deal, there’s almost no use trying to explain. You either get it all at once, even if you can’t articulate it, or not at all. But I encourage you to try to get it, because it’s a bracing comic vision that Tim Burton insists he won’t be calling up again in this lifetime.
At the current pace, with the current rate of advancement in medical science, Tim Burton won’t make a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice until after he’s dead. Of course, if the Beetlejuice films teach us anything, it’s that there are many cheerful ways for the dead to continue wreaking havoc in the land of the living.