“Soul-sucking indeed.”
The biggest news in pop culture land this week no doubt was Oasis getting back together again for a series of concerts planned in 2025, at least if one of the Gallagher brothers doesn’t help the other one into the afterlife. Will they be able to recreate the magic that made them the biggest band in the world in the ’90s? Definitely, maybe. But nostalgia is a dangerous thing, and sometimes bringing back an old formula after a hiatus of a few decades doesn’t work. Such is the case for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a film that coasts too much on fond memories of an original film that strictly speaking wasn’t that great to begin with. Retreading familiar paths and with a narrative that is roughly the same as the 1988 grisly comedy, Burton’s revisiting of the fictional town of Winter River is little more that a string of visual gags and snappy (but rarely funny) one-liners added to a hammy, though aptly so, performance by Michael Keaton as the title character ghoul. The film has its moments, and its depiction of the central mother-daughter relationship is surprisingly sweet and nuanced, but even at its short runtime it grows stale all too quickly. With most of the original cast returning, some more successfully than others, and with mostly pointless additions to the roster, the film’s possible box-office success is still an open question but the cinematic success is at a bare minimum.
Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the goth daughter that elicited Beetlejuice’s romantic yet selfish interest in the original film, has become a successful TV medium-slash-exorcist under the guidance of her manager-slash-boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), an overly compassionate sigma male who will turn out to have base capitalist reasons for courting Lydia. The art career of Lydia’s mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has taken off in the decades since the original adventure, but her father’s fortunes fared far worse: originally played by Jeffrey Jones, whose record as a sex offender cut his Hollywood career short around the start of the century, Charles Deetz was eaten by a shark while practicing his ornithology hobby somewhere in Polynesia (Charles is brought back in claymation form to explain this story). This brings three generations of women back to Winter River: Delia, Lydia, and the granddaughter, Astrid (rising star Jenna Ortega). The latter is struggling with the loss of her own father and the career of her mother as a glorified ghost peddler; the studious girl only believes in the real, and ectoplasm and exorcism are in her eyes a hoax. While exploring the old Deetz family home Astrid discovers the old town model, that played a central role in the first film, while scouring the attic. It doesn’t take long for someone to utter the cursed name three times and for Keaton’s crass prankster demon to appear. With several marriages involved and, like in the first film, the mission to save someone from the underworld, the film becomes a series of set pieces and dime-a-dozen jokes, often wink-wink references that most of the film’s main audience won’t grasp, culminating in a drawn-out finale that improbably revolves around ‘MacArthur Park‘ and in which all loose ends are neatly tied together. Mother and daughter Deetz realize that you have to live the great moments in your life now, and not leave them as memories for the afterlife.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice works best when it focuses on this relationship between the only two characters of substance, with the actresses (Ryder and Ortega) delivering the film’s most satisfying performances by virtue of having the only parts that have some depth. Ryder is clearly game for the kooky mother role that has to relive her worst memories decades after they happened, and Ortega is perfectly cast as the young ingénue that discovers there is more to this world than just science, and that the relationships you have with others, in her case specifically the one with her mother, are the key to happiness. Burton invests quite a lot of time in drawing the mother-daughter dynamic, particularly later in the film when their relationship is all that can save Astrid and Lydia, and even if it follows exactly the path you expect it to, this emotional core is the best Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has to offer. Astrid’s initial side quest with a local boy (Arthur Conti) that blossoms into budding romance seems from another film altogether, a teen romcom with two awkward emo kids finding each other (whoever had Sigur Rós as a soundtrack entry on their bingo card is a winner), but neatly leaves clues for this plot strand going haywire and putting Astrid in danger of eternal doom. Other new additions to the cast are more pointless: Willem Dafoe plays a dead actor who used to be on a cop show and by virtue of that is now a captain in the netherworld’s police force, investigating the case of a soul-sucking demon (Monica Bellucci) leaving behind a trail of empty ghost husks. The demon in question is the former wife of Beetlejuice, responsible for his death-by-poison but hacked to pieces by Keaton’s character before he died (the backstory for this is inexplicably told in Italian). She is now out for revenge. All plot strands end up in Winter River’s church at the wedding of Lydia and Rory, where one by one all demons are exorcised to ensure the happy ending that became apparent as soon as the film made us aware of the strained relationship between Ryder’s Lydia and Ortega’s Astrid.
There must be a metaphor somewhere in the fact that director Tim Burton has made a soulless film in which a soul-sucking demon is played by Monica Bellucci. Like his lead actor, Burton is mostly phoning it in and coasting on nostalgia and bringing back artefacts that were important in Beetlejuice. The opening shot is a blatant recreation of the original, including the hideous ’80s font listing the cast. Most rules of the ghost world will be familiar with those who have seen the 1988 film, but that doesn’t hold Burton back from his characters verbalizing them just to make sure that you get it. Several of the supporting roles, Theroux’s in particular, are little more than vessels for exposition and plot advancement, or are reduced to quippy dialogue spewing, and paper-thin semblances of a character (O’Hara). The formula that worked in the late ’80s is trite 35 years later, but Burton doesn’t seem to realize it. All props to the art direction department though, because the film for the most part still has that tactile, handcrafted feel of the original, eschewing slickness for an inspired haunted-house look that can be found in any carnival ground. The times that the film does use CGI (with a not-so-subtle nod to Dune) it sticks out like a sore thumb, not in the least because its quality is pretty poor, but that can be forgiven for the glorious, colorful work that is littered throughout Beetlejuice‘s world, be it in reality or in the afterlife.
It is all in service of a film though that is anything but inspired and little more than a rehash of a film from a more successful Burton era. Was this film really necessary? One believable example of human interaction and a handful of gags that work (though anybody but film buffs will see the Mario Bava joke fly right over their head) does not stack up against a string of plot devices disguised as characters and a hodgepodge soundtrack of songs from across the decades that rarely make any sense within the narrative. The Bee Gees’ ‘Tragedy‘ accompanying a montage in which Bellucci’s character puts herself together is particularly baffling, while the way ‘MacArthur Park‘ is used in the big set piece that ends the film does strike fear in the hearts of the people that still have to see Todd Phillips’ pseudo-musical Joker: Folie à Deux later this week. These music references cycle back to Oasis: a cynical interpretation of their reunion is that Noel Gallagher is in need of cash to pay for his recent divorce. A similar cynical approach to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will say that the film does feel at times more like a blatant, formulaic cash grab and less like the work of a filmmaker who put his heart and soul into this project. Soul-sucking indeed.
(c) Image copyright: Parisa Taghizadeh / Warner Bros Entertainment Inc.