To watch Tim Burton’s 1988 macabre comedy classic Beetlejuice is to remember what made him such a force in filmmaking. At the tail end of the Reagan years, his comic world-view was unique, as he looked at clean, bright, wholesome suburban America and found it all irredeemably weird. Beetlejuice’s combination of stellar production values with a bizarre and death-ridden sense of humor would recur through his best movies and some of his worst ones as well. Over the last decades, his Goth-meets-cool sensibility became so mainstream that it even popped up in Marvel’s superhero sagas. Maybe I’m refreshed by going back to the source, or maybe these characters have been away long enough for me to miss them. Either way, I found his sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice oddly comforting despite reworking so many of the original’s gags.
The present day finds Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) having spent the last 15 years as the host of a paranormal TV show in New York City. When she receives the news of her father’s death on a birdwatching trip near Tuvalu, she has to return to that house in Connecticut to clean out his things, along with her moody teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and Dad’s widow Delia (Catherine O’Hara). Also tagging along is Lydia’s manager and boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), who proposes to her publicly during the wake — she responds, “Okay, I guess” — and sets a wedding date for Halloween, two days hence. Lydia keeps having visions of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), who has something to say about that wedding decades after his plans to marry her were chomped by a sandworm.
The original film had a dance number with characters forced to lip-sync to “Day-O,” and here there’s another such number set to “MacArthur Park.” (Just like the Richard Harris song, the number here goes on too long.) Maybe artists just lose the knack for outrageous humor as they get older, but Burton doesn’t give us anything as shockingly funny as that original dance number. The plot is all over the place, with Astrid falling for a cute boy (Arthur Conti), her missing biological father (Santiago Cabrera) turning up, Beetlejuice being chased by his crazy soul-sucking ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), and everyone being chased by a Hollywood star-turned-cop for the afterlife (Willem Dafoe).
Granted, tight plotting is never what we went to Tim Burton movies for. Yet nobody in this heavyweight cast seems to quite bring their best to their roles, and as Delia points out, Lydia’s descent from effortlessly cool Goth girl to codependent pill-popping minor celebrity is more than a bit depressing. Astrid also comes out as a disappointingly normal girl who doesn’t believe in ghosts and thinks her mother is a con artist. I would think that having Lydia Deetz for a mother would be a recipe for turning a girl into a Republican tradwife. Burton does have experience with the type — remember those blonde housewives in Edward Scissorhands? — and exposing someone like that to monsters would have been funnier than what we have.
The sequel still gives us comedy bits at an agreeable pace. In one cutely modern touch, Beetlejuice starts reappearing to Lydia not through newspaper ads but through pop-ups on her smartphone. Beetlejuice’s past with Delores plays out in a flashback that parodies Mario Bava’s 1960s horror movies, complete with grainy black-and-white visuals and florid Italian-language narration. The waiting room for the recently dead people remains a rich vein of visual jokes, and Beetlejuice’s stint as a couples counselor for Lydia and Rory satirizes therapy-speak with some gusto. (Rory says Beetlejuice’s name three times to prove that he doesn’t exist, and I wish the demon had taken the smarmy TV producer apart, figuratively but also literally.) All this helps make this journey back to Tim Burton’s early stomping grounds one worth taking.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Jenna Ortega. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Rated PG-13.
