Warner Bros.
Tim Burton is one of the few living directors who can lay claim to an adjective.
Yes, he has a distinct visual style—practically a house style—but it takes more than style make a movie Burtonesque (Wes Anderson also has a trademark style, but no one ever calls it Andersonian). Like Spielbergian, Hitchcockian and Kafkaesque, to be Burtonesque is to live inside of a mood.
Tim Burton himself defined that mood himself in an interview he gave somewhere between Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands: he described it the feeling of being sad for characters because you know they’re going to die (as opposed to, um, who else exactly?).
From Frankenweenie onward, every Tim Burton movie has revolved around characters who are just too freaking weird to live in this world.
Most of them wind up carving out a freaky ghost world of their own, merrily dancing to the minor-key, circus-broke-down-melodies of Danny Elfman.
The original 1988 Beetlejuice is in many ways the most Burtonesque movie of them all. Between the postmodern wackiness of the Deetzes and the off-kilter, bureaucratized afterlife that the Maitlands are consigned to, the movie celebrates weird. It disdains suburban conformity. Its rules are that it has no rules. The Handbook For the Recently Deceased reads, in Adam Maitland’s words, like stereo instructions. The dead appear as they did when they died, except when they don’t: even though Adam and Barbara drowned, they’re exempt from being soaking wet for eternity. We’re told at one point that being dead solves nothing, and it doesn’t. The undead are just as petty, plodding, and miserable as the living, while the living are just as bizarre as the dead. The movie doesn’t end with epiphanies or personal transformation. The living haven’t learned to deny death and the dead haven’t learned to move on. They’ve just found a way to co-exist, that’s all.
The title character (don’t say his name) reigns over it all as a master of anarchy worthy of Looney Tunes. Michael Keaton plays him like a Borscht Belt comedian with a libido that seems way too handsy for a family movie (is it a family movie? You can never tell with Tim Burton. This is the guy who thought it was okay for kids to watch the Penguin bite off somebody’s nose in Batman Returns). His counterfoil is Lydia Deetz, and it’s thanks to Winona Ryder’s performance that today we think of goth not as the brooding, post-punk darkness of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” but as something quaint, almost cute. Something Burtonesque.
All of which is to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may well be the least Burtonesque movie Tim Burton has ever made.
Even though it has the same director, two of the same writers, and most of the original cast, it just doesn’t give the same crazy-sideshow vibe of the original. Possibly because too much time has passed and the actors don’t shimmy like they used to.
Maybe because too many of the original cast aren’t with us now—some are for-real dead (R.I.P. Glenn Shadix as Otho), others are decades older and ghosts aren’t supposed to age (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), and some we probably should not discuss at all (Jeffrey Jones).
But I think the main reason there is something unBurtonesque about B2 (I refuse to keep typing the full name) is that it broke its own rule to have no rules. It has robbed death of its mystery and its misery, and in so doing has made it kinda dull.
Death in the original Beetlejuice isn’t meant to be scary so much as purposeless. Is there a God? No idea. Are people punished for their sins? Sure, why not. Have fun while you can, kids. Enjoy the Harry Belafonte music, but don’t expect any angel choirs. Stumble on, do your job, and steer clear of the sandworms.
The afterlife of B2 has all the trappings of the original but none of the persistent weirdness.
This afterlife comes with an arc: the dead are meant to resolve their issues before they board the Soul Train (no, seriously, that’s what it’s called) and head to their reward. No word if there’s also a Disco Inferno, but it seems there will still be puns in the world to come.
The plot is filled with arcs. In the intervening decades, Lydia married, they had a child, and her husband died. She’s now parlayed her ability to see ghosts into a TV medium career, and has also apparently passed that talent on to her daughter Astrid (who else is gonna play this part? Of course it’s Jenna Ortega). Lydia wants to shield her daughter from the spooky things she’s seen. Astrid wants her mom to deal with her father’s death and move on.
Charles Deetz has died in a shark attack and is wandering the afterlife with a missing head, which I guess is about as good a way to Fake Shemp a character as any). Lydia is being courted by her money-hungry manager, played by Justin Theroux with way too much rabbity energy for a guy who made his bones in Mulholland Drive.
And then there’s Delia Deetz, portrayed by the revered Catherine O’Hara, an actress whose talent for playing self-obsessed divas is sorely tested by a script that seems determined to make her motherly. Delia wants to prove she can be a good stepmother to Lydia and a good step-grandmother to Astrid. She wants to find Charles in the afterlife so that he’ll know she really loved him. See? She’s got an arc too. Everybody in this movie has an arc.
Beetlejuice has both an arc and a backstory.
In the first movie, he was cheerfully amoral: he was willing to tell any lie to Lydia that would get him back into the living world. Now it seems he’s getting a soft spot for Lydia and Delia. He also has an ex, the one who sucked him into the afterlife when he was just starting to see the fun side of the Black Death.
This is Dolores, a soul eater, played by Monica Bellucci. She’s called that because she literally eats souls, sucking the ectoplasmic innards of ghosts and leaving only their skins and clothes behind (Just exactly what are ghost skins and clothes made of? Wouldn’t they be made of the same stuff as ghost souls, and if so shouldn’t she eat those too?). Having a remorseless, sexy-scary Big Bad relieves Beetlejuice from villain duty and moves him into lovable antihero territory. He still wants to escape the afterlife, but at least this time he offers informed consent.
A lot of the humor of the original stemmed from its willingness to let dark be dark.
Apart from Lydia, all of the characters in Beetlejuice were fatally self-interested. Charles Deetz wants to exploit the ghosts for real estate deals. Delia wants to turn them into party stunts. As sympathetic as Adam and Barbara are, what they want is selfish: they’re determined to keep their house to themselves even though they no longer have any claim to it, and they’re willing to torment people to get there.
The Beetlejuice sequel doesn’t dispel that selfishness, but it does restrict it to characters we’re not meant to like: most of these are romantic partners, which includes Lydia’s boyfriend, Beetlejuice’s ex-lover, and the bad boy Astrid is foolish enough to love at first sight. This part does feel like Burton: all these years dating hot actresses and sex still makes him feel icky.
I left Beetlejuice Beetlejuice not hating it so much as feeling not much of anything about it.
It reminded me a lot of the blockbuster sequels we got in the late 90s and early 2000s, like Men in Black 2 and Addams Family Values, where the formula was to repeat the plot of the first movie, only bigger, and to assign a new backstory that’s meant to give them added depth but instead makes them seem arbitrary and plot-reliant.
There’s a story that Tim Burton didn’t want to make a sequel, so he commissioned Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian hoping it would turn off the producers. I wonder how much worse that movie would have been.
I’ve always suspected that Tim Burton is more dependent on good scripts than most directors. He tends to film movies just as they were written, which is a double-edged sword. When he gets an Ed Wood or a PeeWee’s Big Adventure, he’s quite good. When it’s a Planet of the Apes or Dark Shadows, not so much.
It’s strange to consider that a director who’s that well known for a distinctive style doesn’t exert more control over his material. This is where Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lets us down. Not because Burton doesn’t know how to tell the story, but because he doesn’t seem to care which story he’s telling. The characters are whatever the plot needs them to be.
It seems to me that the dead deserve better than that.
Extras include commentary, featurettes, and making-of.
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