Tim Burton’s Hail Mary
There was one thing I worried the most about this sequel, and it was Michael Keaton’s age. Playing a character whose prime attribute is his agelessness, he’s the one thing that kept the 1988 original — the young Tim Burton’s visually creative work of comic trash — from running out of steam, with his firecrackers of depraved brutishness that suggests a Groucho Marx without his gentlemanly facade, sped up to match early Robin Williams. Fast forward to 2024 A.D., and though he’s supposed to have lived for hundreds of years, he’s aged from an uninhibited jester to a more sluggish imitation of one in just under forty, and the difference is scary.
As Pauline Kael wrote in her review of the original Beetlejuice, “Keaton is like an exploding head. He isn’t onscreen nearly enough — when he is, he shoots the film sky-high.” We might take relief in that he’s onscreen a great deal this time around, but he’s also not quite the same Beetlejuice we were hoping for. He’s still in black and white stripes, with filthy bile green hair madly curled every which way like a mad scientist, his face painted sickly white, and lips and eye sockets black — still the Joker of the cartoons everyone remembers, but the punky zest is gone, and all that’s left is the appearance and the gags. He rarely raises his pitch here, and you can’t help but think back to his boasting in the first movie about how many times he’s seen The Exorcist (“And it keeps getting funnier every single time!”) and sigh. He hasn’t the same bounce he had over 30 years ago: you could never tell in the blink of an eye if he’s gonna sexually assault Geena Davis, or make Alec Baldwin say nonsense against his will, or get jumpily ecstatic when he discovers a fake whorehouse. Now, when Catherine O’Hara jerks out his name, he merely pops out from behind, like he has already been doing for the last hour. The surprises have no sense of wonder. Though he has the will to try, his physique doesn’t match the erratic moves. He’s the bad grandpa on steroids; all the balance is gone. When he does the skits, he does not leave the ground; he jumps and tramples on it. The only bits that worked were his lampoon of Italian gothic and the “MacArthur Park” dance sequence, and both of those were dubbed.
Not unlike the plight of Keaton, or for that matter most of the main cast here, you get the sense that Burton’s trying to bring his earlier eye-popping force for weird whimsy out of him, and failing. But it’s an honest failure: few in his line can do what he had hoped with this belated sequel, not after the many attempts at serious storytelling and vapid romanticism that undercut his innate sensibility. The original Beetlejuice is a wonderful farce of haunted house cliches, and there was the bright sunshine suburban milieu with which it opens, for the sick craze that follows to juxtapose to ironic effects. In this sequel, we open right into the darkness, and the lightning strikes. And though the film thankfully doesn’t dwell on the new characters’ disbelief, the lack of contrast robbed Burton of the chance to spoof that trope like he was able to in 1988.
There’s something else still. If Burton was really poised to bring back his 80s flair, he should’ve had Winona Ryder‘s Lydia Deetz play up the nonchalance of her youth, which was so droll in the face of ghosts. Beetlejuice’s attempts at plaguing her dreams would have been much funnier had she reacted the same way her parents did when Adam and Barbara tried to scare them out. Instead, what is this anxiety attack on her face that runs throughout the entire course of the film? And who is this Winona Ryder parroting when Beetlejuice tries to haunt her? Where has the “abnormal,” darkly funny Lydia gone?
The sequel commits the sin the original avoided by brevity and parodies: it dramatizes the family dynamic. “The plot is just a formality,” Kael writes in ’88. “To enjoy the movie, you may have to be prepared to jump back into a jack-in-the-box universe.” Now, by the time it’s finally moving on from setting up the family conflict and all the side plots, we had long been done with the “preparing” and the waiting, and have in our hands a flashlight and a book. Not only does it take too long to get going, but everything it’s setting up barely went anywhere, either.
Although there were plenty of new effects — the soul-sucking deaths, which leave only the shell of the dead behind, have the same inexplicable pep of a leaking balloon — they don’t leave you high, and all they bring out is a few chuckles. The better sequences were ones with dance music, but it’s as if someone on the set pointed to the “Day-O” sequence from ’88 and said: “What if we fill the movie with that, except using copyrighted pop music?” The “MacArthur Park” ending is a high point, but we might feel a sense of déjà vu as our legs were being pulled. The 1988 film’s ending, while too short, outmaneuvered us by going madcap. It wasn’t using tricks in the toolbox (like what they were doing here): the tricks fell out of the sky and knocked our socks off. Here, it’s only energy pumping. It isn’t on the level of creative bankruptcy of most blockbuster sequels of late, but it sure can’t claim the title “innovative.”
Like how Kael predicted that Spielberg was gonna be the Howard Hawks of his generation, she correctly pointed out: “Burton may not have found his storytelling skills yet, or his structure, either, but then he may never find them.” As many feared, the latter has turned out to be true: look no further than Planet of the Apes (2001), Dark Shadows (2012), and Dumbo (2019). He’s lost his juice. His early films steer right through to the unworldly heart of the early Disney animated pictures. But all artists grow up, and some things are destined to be lost. Spielberg took on the veneer of a pastor as he was leaving behind the child and caricaturist of 1941, The Sugarland Express, and Jaws for Schindler’s List and Lincoln; and when he tries to look back, he ends up with the travesty that is Ready Player One. Burton has spent decades trying to mature into a gothic romanticist, and no one now can look at him the same way they could when he was much more of a comic artist. Not even if they, or he, tried.
★★☆☆
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com/redmoonrising/film/beetlejuice-beetlejuice/
