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    • Tim Burton’s sequel: Charming (if unnecessary)
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    Tim Burton’s sequel: Charming (if unnecessary)

    Bronwen Cerys Posted on

    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits theaters on Friday, September 6. This review is based on a screening at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

    In the pantheon of obligatory legacy sequels, Beetlejuice is perhaps the least necessary – after the first Beetlejuicethere was little plot or world-building left to explore (though that didn’t stop the animated series and years of speculation about a sequel). But that’s one reason Tim Burton’s follow-up to his beloved 1988 horror-comedy works. At no point does the reboot 36 years later tout itself as “important” with a capital I, even as it does add a sense of weight and grandeur to existing characters and events. Though there’s far less plot than the original – which, despite its narrative lack of substance, got by on its tongue-in-cheek tone and imaginative production design – every choice Burton makes here is simply geared toward cartoonishly macabre fun in the style of its predecessor. That’s fine – even charming at times – and that’s all it needs.

    Decades after her first encounter with the strange and unusual goth host, former antisocial goth actress Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now uses her sixth sense as the host of the popular paranormal television series Ghost House. With the help of her overzealous boyfriend/manager Rory (Justin Theroux), she’s become a minor celebrity, but the past still has a hold on her, and not just because she wears the same updo and spiky bangs she did as a teenager. Whenever Lydia sees a black and white striped outfit, she has brief glimpses of the undead bio-exorcist and sex pest Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who tried to force her into marriage in the first film.

    Lydia’s problems, however, are much broader than the previous-film-induced PTSD that plagues her counterparts in other legacy series sequels, like the final two Scream films or David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, speaking of Scream), who is college-age and dismissive of her mother’s supernatural claims, is otherwise a mirror image of the moodier Lydia circa 1988; the death of Astrid’s father drives another wedge between them. Lydia’s stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) continues to be a self-centered conceptual artist, only now on a much larger scale. And her own father, Charles, recently died a comically gruesome death, which seems like an ironic dig at actor Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the original before later being charged with child pornography. The actor will of course not be brought back for the sequel, but his character’s death is depicted extensively using CGI-assisted stop motion.

    On one hand, it feels like a justified, metatextual middle finger to so blatantly marginalize Jones, an actor whose crimes also retrospectively tarnish Burton’s Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow. On the other hand, it also draws attention to the fact that Burton hasn’t stopped working with composer Danny Elfman, the subject of multiple sexual harassment and assault lawsuits, and whose signature springy brass is as recognizable as his name in the opening credits of Beetlejuice. Additionally, because of this approach to Jones, no one really takes Charles’ death seriously—though some characters pretend to for personal reasons—which also proves a little awkward. After all, his death is the reason these scattered characters reunite at the old Maitland/Deetz house, the setting of the first film. Burton has always either sidestepped death or laced it with humor, but Beetlejuice does this while also making a sincere attempt to confront grief, in the form of Astrid’s lack of closure with her father. Combined with the film’s surprising in-world explanation for the absence of the Maitlands (ghost couple Adam and Barbara, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in Beetlejuice), it feels like the sequel is constantly on the verge of a more thoughtful and reflective approach to mortality, even as it keeps moving away from it.

    The tonal differences are forgivable, however, once the film’s silly supernatural escapades begin. Betelgeuse, who hasn’t stopped pining after Lydia, still caters to deceased people looking to get rid of their living guests in their former homes, and has now expanded his operation with the help of dozens of lumbering assistants with shrunken heads and swollen plastic eyes—just one of the many delightful special effects that make Beetlejuice an ideal entry into the horror genre for younger viewers. It also happens that Betelgeuse’s long-dead and long-dismembered ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) escapes her bonds in the afterlife and re-tapes her body parts, hoping to use her demonic, soul-sucking powers to exact revenge on him.

    These storylines don’t collide so much as just touch by chance—Bellucci, who is fully committed to her character’s gimmick, has frustratingly little screen time—but each is silly enough to warrant a chuckle. Willem Dafoe, for example, plays the late B-movie actor Wolf Jackson, whose obsession with playing a TV cop led him to form a postmortem “Ghoul Squad” of dead, blue-skinned cops who might as well be asphyxiated Super Troopers. Wolf hunts down rule-breakers like Betelgeuse (or living people who force their way into the afterlife, as happens here) while coming up with cheesy action-movie lines on the fly. Dafoe is clearly out of place in his own film, as he is barely connected to the rest of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – which, for example, contains a romantic subplot for Astrid taken from a young adult novel – but like most of the cast, the Spider Man The actor has infectious fun.

    Every decision Burton makes here is aimed at cartoonishly macabre fun in the style of the first film.

    This is the nature of the film as a whole, even if its puzzle pieces rarely fit together. Characters and storylines are often dropped arbitrarily – like AthenaSami Silmane as a recently deceased graffiti artist—which makes her mere facade or exhibition. The bureaucracy of the afterlife isn’t so much a central joke this time around as a sideshow, but Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who, along with Ortega, make this both a Wednesday Meetup and a Beetlejuice sequel) provide enough macabre puns and gruesome visual gags to make her fleeting presence worthwhile. (A character casually saying she feels “dizzy” is perhaps the film’s funniest joke, for reasons best discovered in the theater.)

    The conflict between trippy stage design (à la Robert Weines The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and boring bureaucracy are the defining characteristics of Beetlejuice’s underworld. But while the analog charm remains, the sequel also shows Burton’s attempts to modernize both his setting and his vocabulary. Sometimes it works wonders, with self-centered characters like Rory using therapy speak to hide their true intentions (Theroux is arguably the film’s comedic secret weapon). Other attempts, unfortunately, aren’t nearly as character-centered; they come across as half-hearted jabs at the internet, influencers, streaming, and social media, and are far less effective.

    Despite these uneven attempts to deal with a changing world, Burton (perhaps rightly) neither tries to modernize Betelgeuse by subverting or “correcting” him, nor does he amplify the character’s creepiness by having him chase after another teenager. He’s still a disgusting goblin, and Keaton plays him with the same unabashed malice as in the first film, only this time he’s up to some crazier monster tricks rather than a penchant for underage girls – if only due to the fact that Ryder is now in her 50s.

    Admittedly, this loses the execution of one of the film’s central themes, which is that Lydia sees herself in Astrid and tries to protect her from the experiences she’s now living with. But that’s far too serious a story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – a film in which the characters dismiss the idea of ​​”trauma” as some kind of trendy, modern invention – even though it might arguably be the right one. It’s a silly little sequel to an equally silly original, and it’s hard to imagine wanting or needing much more of it.

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    Bronwen Cerys
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