Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review
Director: Tim Burton
Writer: Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Stars: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara and Jenna Ortega
Running Time: 104 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
Upon rewatching the original Beetlejuice (1988), I recalled how much of its success is due to its elegant simplicity – a reverse ghost story, a plot of nice ghosts eager to rid themselves of insufferable humans. Who can’t relate to that? It’s a great elevator pitch, a tight 90-minute creature feature that continued the trend of squishy, endearing horror-inspired 80s genre-benders. It also leaves space for Tim Burton’s greatest strength – world building. In Beetlejuice, you can feel Tim Burton’s 30 year-old energy behind the lens, crafting each scene, hanging each picture with his fresh eccentricity. The film’s lack of dense plot gives him the breathing space to conjure moments of inspired genius, such as the raucous dinner table karaoke scene set to Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). It’s the kind of joyful weirdness that has disappeared in his work since the vapid Planet of the Apes (2001). To many long-time fans, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s returning talent and marketing suggests there could be hope.
Unfortunately Tim Burton’s return to his legacy material winds up overplotted and hampered by joylessness. With a multitude of plotlines spreading out from three different generations of the Deetz family, we’re provided a strangely overwrought, overplotted experience, full of the type of exposition that the original dared to leave out. It’s all too engineered, too traditional, too screenwritery. Instead of the unusual, campy choices of the original, we get perfunctory dialogue and the barest smidgeon of magic. In a world that should surprise us consistently, what’s so disappointing is how bland the experience is.
What is wonderful is seeing these performers again – Winona Ryder remains a glowing, goth queen as Lydia Deetz, channeling the same vulnerability she had as a teenager. Now as the host of TV show Ghost House, she plies her trademark ghost whispering skills for audience scores. It’s difficult to describe how wide my smile was upon seeing the legendary Catherine O’Hara return as Delia, who manages to elevate the scant comedic material. Goth queen-elect Jenna Ortega is Astrid, Lydia’s estranged daughter, completing a multi-generational trio of admirable female leads. It’s just a shame the screenplay is thunderously shoddy.
With the loss of the original’s guileful simplicity, here each character is provided their own compartmentalized plot – Lydia defends herself from Beetlejuice’s continued lust for her; Astrid falls for the local teenage boy; even Beetlejuice is provided an arc this time with his dead ex-wife (Monica Bellucci) pursuing him for revenge. These divergent plotlines don’t so much elegantly overlap as they smash together, threads wrapping up with sudden contrivance. The feeling is one of too many ideas over too much time, a screenplay trying to please everyone’s input but ultimately muddying the pleasure of seeing imaginative afterlife mischief.
No further evidence is needed than Michael Keaton’s performance, which is both impressive and redundant. He’s having fun again inhabiting the limitless ego of this bio-exorcist, but even his performative talents can’t shift the strangely uninspired dialogue out of the depths of function. The plot requires him to say it, so he does. The foolery and aimlessness of his delightful and ruthless anarchy is lost in a you-must-marry-me plot that seems too calculated for a character that always felt like chaos incarnate – he’s should be a plot disruptor, not a plot setter.
We are offered an ensemble cast of characters to add color, including Willam Defoe’s Wolf Jackson, an afterlife detective, who with a few genuine meta-comedy moments straight from a scene-chewing cop-show, channels the type of ironic, film-as-a-film humour you might find in a Wes Anderson film. There are some one-liners, some individual moments of energy that recall better times, but they only serve to remind us of the film’s strained storytelling. In a strange way, the film is so enamoured with playing the old hits within the blueprint of a bad story that those tired callbacks standout more awkwardly. It’s not that fan-service is inherently bad, it's that the scaffolding surrounding these moments feels so rickety that it can barely hold up the weight of a shallow wink to the crowd.
Tim Burton’s fine career has two consistent themes: he’s a visionary and he’s often a poor judge of storytelling. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has one example worth focusing on. In one scene Lydia and boyfriend Rory are shrunken down into the iconic model of Winter River, Connecticut, located in the Deetz family attic. As both characters orientate themselves, we are offered the inane moment of a character saying, “We’re in the model!” to explain away any possible confusion. This is exactly the type of laziness the movie typifies, a film more willing to explain verbally than visually, so impatient to hand-hold us through world-building rules the first movie already established. Not only was it clumsy, but also completely unnecessary when the same scene took place in the first movie and was visually established – the visual gag of the first movie showed us the model’s toy-like textures, spikey grass made of foam. This moment of heavy-handed explanation robs the audience of natural discovery, of being able to connect the Beetlejuice universe together on our own. Instead we are explained everything immediately. What you lose is the pleasure of witnessing a film that trusts it’s audience.
