Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an Unhinged Celebration of the Comedically Macabre
As legacy sequels go, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gets so much right that it’s easy to gloss over its more obvious missteps. Director Tim Burton is at the top of his game, crafting his best film since 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Michael Keaton returns to one of his most iconic roles with virtuoso freewheeling aplomb. Winona Ryder is fantastic. Jenna Ortega proves to be a sublime addition to the ensemble.
As for Catherine O’Hara, much like she did in 1988’s Beetlejuice, she steals every scene she’s in. Heck. I’d go so far as to say her performance is downright Oscar-worthy.
Seriously, though, as much as I am one to support and even cheerlead much of Burton’s 21st-century output (most notably 2012’s Frankenweenie), I’m still not going to make the case he’s been working at the height of his powers. It’s as if he’s frequently been hamstrung by massive budgets and overbearing studio mandates that have kept his more phantasmagoric impulses from coming to fruition. In the case of outright misfires like Planet of the Apes, Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland, this is especially apparent.
Here, it is as if Warner Bros. decided to take the cuffs completely off. Burton, Keaton, and writers Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith let their imaginations run wild. Instead of crafting a follow-up that recycles material from the ’80s supernatural comedy favorite, they craft something that boldly goes in its own idiosyncratic direction. It is a continuation of the story for the primary characters, not a repeat of what they went through before, and as such, there are several unexpected surprises and even more full-throated belly laughs.
Thirty-plus years after Lydia Deetz (Ryder) and the ghosts of Adam and Barbara Maitland defeated the playfully duplicitous trickster demon Betelgeuse (Keaton) from permanently returning to the land of the living, three generations of Deetz women return to Winter River to bury family patriarch Charles. While figuring out what to do with their old family home, Lydia (now a successful psychic hosting a popular syndicated television program), her estranged teenage daughter Astrid (Ortega), and her unconventional stepmother Delia (O’Hara) are all forced to deal with their concepts of death and the afterlife in their own way. They are joined by Lydia’s producer and agent boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), who sees the funeral, the wake, and a potential Halloween night wedding to his beloved as plum social media marketing opportunities.
What happens from there? A lot. Sometimes too much. For all its surreal moments, the first film was fairly straightforward, but this time there are a trio of primary plot tangents working on parallel paths, all of which have their own subplots feeding into them. Betelgeuse has been looking to worm his way back into Lydia’s life for another crack at matrimonial resurrection. A soul-sucking demon named Delores (Monica Bellucci) is boldly stomping her way through the afterlife, searching for the husband who chopped her into pieces centuries prior. Astrid is making friends with a Winter River local (Arthur Conti) and somehow finds herself stranded in the hereafter, even though she’s still very much alive.
Burton and company do not work all that hard to make sense of any of this. Thankfully, they really don’t need to. The writing is so sharp from character and world-building perspectives that it oddly does not matter that these narrative events barely stay connected. This is such a fast-paced 104 minutes that the whole film was hurtling toward its manically musical conclusion before I even realized it. Burton is in such complete control that precious little feels out of place or unnecessary, and his wizardry at choreographing each piece of the puzzle is close to flawless.
The best decision the creative team made was remembering that the reason Betelgeuse has remained such an iconic character over the past three-plus decades is that — even though his name is in the title — he’s actually not on the screen that much in the previous motion picture. Where lesser filmmakers (and actors) would have tried to put this demon in every other scene in a sequel, Burton, Keaton, and the writers understand that less is more.
Betelgeuse is around for roughly a third of the running time. This allows the demon to show up, take center stage, then vanish to who-knows-where, only to reappear at the most opportune moment to shake things up again. This gives Keaton the freedom to go as big as he wants to, but never at the expense of his talented costars. He elevates the material, yes, but the actor also makes everyone else better too, allowing the ensemble to thrive in exactly the way he does.
The technical team does not include a lot of Beetlejuice returnees (veteran production designer Bo Welch is back as a visual consultant, as is legendary composer — and constant Burton collaborator — Danny Elfman), but this infusion of new blood generates a wondrous visual eccentricity. From cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and new production designer Mark Scruton to the sensational team of makeup artists and four-time Academy Award–winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, the production has a vibrantly lush and pleasingly tactile practicality. The sublime visual effects are a daring combination of past (stop-motion, animatronic, puppeteering, animation, etc.) and present (computer-generated), and the lines separating one medium from the other are borderline seamless.
The biggest negative for me was one that few in the audience will likely have. For reasons not worth going into here (do a quick internet search), a scene where a children’s choir sings over Charles Deetz’s grave is unintentionally creepy, and it did ick me out enough that I became uncomfortable. While veteran Burton regular Jeffrey Jones does not return for the sequel, his presence is still felt, mainly because his character’s death is a foundational plot point.
Otherwise, my remaining nitpicks are fairly minimal. As per most comedies, not all of the gags will land for every viewer. Also, as amusing as he is, most of the scenes involving Willem Dafoe as a deceased “I did all my own stunts!” actor turned hard-boiled afterlife detective hit me as extraneous, although his appearance during the frantic, vaudevillian Broadway-meets-Busby Berkeley climax is something hysterically special.
Ultimately, what I love the most about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it showcases Burton at his most untethered. He mixes in elements of classic Hammer horror, Roger Corman’s go-for-broke excess, and Mario Bava-inspired gothic theatricality with adolescent gleefulness. There are sequences that seem to have been inspired by the likes of Béla Tarr, Werner Herzog, and William Castle. Yet Burton makes all of them come across as organic to the material and exuberantly of his own design. It’s a joyful showcase of the comedically macabre, which makes the 36-year gap between installments well worth the wait.
– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
