It is so nice to have the old gang back that it seems petty to talk about any aspect of this long-awaited Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Reunion. 73-year-old Michael Keaton is still great as the rampant undead “freelance bio-exorcist,” and although he seems a little slower and less electrifyingly hectic than in the delightful first Beetlejuice from 35 years ago, well, none of us are getting any younger.
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, still wearing the gothic widow’s garb and spiky bangs of her depressed teens, remains incredibly lovable even in her confused middle years. Only now she is a real widow, cared for by her own estranged daughter Astrid (the perfectly cast Jenna Ortega from Wednesday), as well as a career as a minor TV celebrity with a ghost hunting show called Haunted House and a pushy friend, a television producer named Rory (Justin Theroux).
Lydia’s mother Delia Deetz (played by the divine Catherine O’Hara) is just as crazy and self-centered as the highly successful conceptual artist she is today (“I am my art”) as she was when she was struggling to get noticed by the art establishment in 1988. Remember Beetlejuice as she raved to her mild-mannered, recently retired real estate developer husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones) about her new house in the “buckets” of Winter River, Connecticut, her voice gradually rising to a hair-raising scream: “I’ll live with you in this shithole, but I need to express myself. If you don’t let me clean out this house and make it my own, I’ll go crazy, AND I’LL TAKE YOU WITH ME!”
Charles is no longer with us (presumably due to Jeffrey Jones’ cancellation) 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’ comically grotesque death. An a cappella children’s choir sings the calypso song “Day-O,” so central to the charm of Beetlejuice ’88, at his grave.
These refreshingly inspired scenes show us that director Tim Burton is back too, after a long, dull stint of making increasingly bad films that ruined his reputation as a filmmaker. In interviews, Burton has indicated that he identifies with one of the film’s main themes: “Sometimes as an adult you lose your bearings a little bit,” he said in an interview, “and then you have to reconnect with yourself. So it became very personal and emotional for me.”
Burton was completely lost creatively, but with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice It shows that you can go home again, and revisits the sweet satirical approach that was once so evident in his films. In the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s, American culture was hard to beat for awfulness. Burton’s loving embrace of occult oddities offered a life-giving alternative. Ghosts and vampires, witches and demons, the undead of all kinds, and a love of the gloom of pop culture offered relief to all of us isolated oddballs in a cruelly conformist culture.
His films took up the tendencies of old-fashioned television entertainment that incorporated horror elements into friendly suburban and small-town comedies – shows like The Addams Family, In love with a witchAnd The MunstersAll of them represented, without any subtlety, little allegories of tolerance of racial, gender and sexual differences that were encouraging in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of the civil rights movement and its backlash.
Burton’s films emphasized a determined love of the communal quality of the “handmade.” His 1994 masterpiece Ed Wood was a celebration of outsiders in America who together formed a film community based on the faded Dracula Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) is a star who overflows with tenderness for his inevitably homely low-budget films. This handmade aspect of Beetlejuice was seen as a prerequisite for any sequel, emphasized Michael Keaton, the second rule right after that that the character Betelgeuse is only given a very limited screen time:
I said, “Tim, if I ever do this again, I can’t be more involved than I was the first time. That would be a really big mistake.” He said, “I already know that.” I said, “And second, 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 some plywood. You know what I mean?
In Beetlejuice In ’88, during the popular “Day-O” number, crew members stuck their hands into the giant shrimp in bowls on the dinner table during demonic possession to grab the faces of Charles, Delia and their guests after the final “Daylight Come and Me Wanna Go Home!” In Beetlejuice Beetlejuicethe song of the possessed is called “MacArthur Park”. In the number, a wedding party of free-dancing expressionists can be heard while Betelgeuse and Lydia waltz on the ceiling, clearly being drawn there by old-fashioned harnesses and wires.
There is a bit too much action in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Detours, including Astrid’s mysterious new boyfriend Jeremy (Arthur Conti) and Betelgeuse’s vengeful ex-wife Delores (the always stunning Monica Bellucci), are probably the reason that things sometimes move more slowly here than in the relaxed Beetlejuice ’88. But the additional characters and plot developments also pay off, such as the wonderful bit about Betelgeuse’s past in plague-ridden medieval Spain when he married Delores, which occasionally causes him to lapse into Spanish. And there are fun scenes with Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe, who are in the Beetlejuice World.
For those who do not quite understand why this wonderful belated return to the world of Beetlejuice is a big deal, there’s almost no point in explaining it. Either you get it immediately, even if you can’t articulate it, or you don’t understand it at all. But I encourage you to try, because it’s a refreshing comic vision that Tim Burton insists he won’t conjure up again in this lifetime.
At the current pace and progress in medicine, Tim Burton will not Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice until he is dead. Of course, if the Beetlejuice Movies teach us one thing: There are many entertaining ways for the dead to continue to wreak havoc in the land of the living.
