In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the dead can dance. They danced and bounced into the afterlife aboard a Soul Train, and that’s exactly what it sounds like, complete with afros and disco balls in a bustling underworld Grand Central Station. It’s one of dozens of delightful throwaway gags in Tim Burton’s surprisingly jaunty sequel to his 1988 classic, a hotly anticipated film that I don’t think many people expected to be very good. What a relief, then, to report that the return of Michael Keaton’s eponymous vaudeville ghoul is one of the most unexpected pleasures of this spooky season, a visually flamboyant and enjoyably inconsequential fun with a playful spirit we haven’t seen from this filmmaker in a long time.
Burton’s empathy for outsiders and kitschy sense of the macabre captivated moviegoers with a series of uniquely personal blockbusters that captured suburban alienation in the 1980s and ’90s. But he’s wasted most of this century on pointless remakes, slapping his brand name on ponderous, ugly CGI spectacles like “Alice in Wonderland” (2010) and “Dumbo” (2019), a strangely self-hating cautionary tale about selling out to evil corporations that felt like a lost artist’s cry for help. I don’t often leave the theater, but Burton’s adaptation of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (2016) had me canceling after 40 minutes because it felt like being locked in a Hot Topic after closing time.
Beetlejuice is a return to basics for the filmmaker, reuniting (most of) the cast from his second effort and taking inspiration from the kind of silly, retro puppet humor and gross-out effects that characterized Tim Burton’s films before they all started looking like digital mush. The images and effects in this film have a handcrafted quality. Even the CGI elements are designed to look practical, and the smooth computer animation is given wobbly little jitters to look more like traditional stop-motion. The film feels like it was made by a human, which is something you can rarely say about a blockbuster sequel these days. It’s also light on its feet, which is even rarer.
Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, the teen ghost whisperer who is now a middle-aged TV psychic with an embittered goth daughter of her own. Jenna Ortega brings her deadpan Wednesday Addams to the screen as the dour Astrid, who torments her mother in the same way Lydia once tormented her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, quietly stealing the show). A family tragedy — involving by far the funniest and most creative way I’ve ever seen to spin a deposed actor — brings them all back to the old haunted Connecticut mansion, where Keaton’s trickster demon Betelgeuse still pines for Ryder, who, you may recall, he once almost forced to become his bride.
But it turns out that old Beet has an ex-wife of his own, a literal soul-sucker played by Burton’s cartoonishly voluptuous real-life lover Monica Bellucci. An objectively hilarious role to give your girlfriend: She’s the dismembered leader of a death cult spawned from hell who puts herself back together with a stapler and sets out to find her ex-husband. I knew the film was going to be something special when her backstory takes the form of a black-and-white homage to horror filmmaker Mario Bava, complete with Keaton’s narration dubbed into Italian with English subtitles. Investigating her case is an afterlife inspector (Willem Dafoe), who on our plane of existence was once a method actor who did his own stunts a little too much and is now playing his favorite cop role for all eternity. It’s impossible to get sick of Dafoe referring to Keaton’s character as “Mr. Geuse.”
There’s plenty more, including Ryder’s goofily dim-witted manager/boyfriend (Justin Theroux, who somehow does a little too much in a film that revels in too much) and Ortega’s hipster love interest, who isn’t quite what he seems. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s script probably has enough plot threads for at least two sequels crammed into it, but the film clocks in at a brisk 104 minutes. That’s at least half an hour shorter than most studio films these days, and the brevity of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is essentially the soul of its wit.
The visual gags come at you fast and furious, the picture moving at the manic pace of Keaton’s babbling monologues. Burton crams every frame with gloriously gross things to look at so that your eyes don’t have time to take it all in. Extras in the afterlife sustain their mortal wounds while loitering in those bureaucratic waiting rooms and winding German Expressionist hallways, and I want to watch the film again just to get a closer look at the guy who died in a hot dog eating contest or the charred sap in a Santa suit.
Ortega’s subplot bears a striking resemblance to one from last spring’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” and it’s instructive to compare the two films. Both are uninvited sequels to supernatural comedies from nearly four decades ago, but the bizarrely reverent new “Ghostbusters” movies groan under the weight of their own lore and take deadly seriously the kind of silly plot details that “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” uses as a thin clothesline to hang jokes on. I can’t help but think that the scene in that film in which a mournful children’s choir sings “Banana Boat (Day-O)” at a funeral is a jab at how seriously modern franchises take their fan service.
It’s in the nature of Keaton’s agent of chaos that he’s constantly breaking the rules of reality that the movie thinks you’ve established, so “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” keeps throwing new inventions and crazy ideas at the wall. Not all of them stick, but they don’t all have to stay at such a frenetic pace. Keaton and Ryder are more energetic on screen than they have been in years, giving it their all for a gonzo climactic number set to Richard Harris’ cover of “MacArthur Park.” (Don’t worry, the movie has room for the Donna Summer version, too. And yes, there’s even a cake in the rain.) It’s the kind of wonderful, nonsensical scene that has no reason to exist except because it’s funny and because it could. The same goes for the movie.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is now in theaters.
