**/****
starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tim Burton
by Walter Chaw Somehow lugubrious at under 100 minutes, overburdened by five or six storylines and an unnecessary new lead character who dominates its first half, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leans hard on Burton’s established weaknesses while largely ignoring his established strengths. It treats women like shrill caricatures, for instance, saving its deepest contempt for Monica Bellucci’s Mrs. Beetlejuice, Delores, a bride so ‘Zilla she reconstitutes herself from her violently dismembered parts for the sole purpose of reuniting with her lost love and murderer, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Lydia (Winona Ryder), the little girl lost from the first film who, by the end, discovered adoptive parents in the now-absent Maitlands, has grown into a ghost-hunting television charlatan engaged to unctuous workshop SNAG Rory (Justin Theroux). As Rory, Theroux appears to be doing Phil Hartman doing Glenn “Otho” Shadix and is asked to carry the comedic load of this thing for far too long. (It’s like showing up for Patti Lupone and getting fucking Florence Foster Jenkins for an hour.) Then there’s young Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s kid, who resents her mother for being a nutjob and her dad (Santiago Cabrera) for becoming piranha food early in her life.
How do these various elements coalesce in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice? I’m not done yet. There’s also a dead actor who once played a detective and is now, in the afterlife, a real detective called Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) on the “case” of rampaging Delores. There’s a cute boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who takes a romantic interest in semi-gloomy, faux-goth Astrid after learning she’s read Crime and Punishment three times. And, Jesus, what else? Oh yeah, Lydia’s mom, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), is still an artist, mourning the recent death of her husband/amateur ornithologist Charles (Jeffrey Jones), who is only in this film as a mutilated-beyond-recognition corpse because Jones was cancelled for being either a sex offender or an art collector. I heard a story about Richard Harris abandoning his wife for a year or so, then showing up at her door one day out of nowhere, asking, “Why didn’t you pay the ransom?” I mention this because there’s an extended musical sequence towards the end of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice set to “MacArthur Park” that is exquisite and the best thing in either film but not as good as that anecdote. Alas, an identical pair of rushed, bone-headed trapdoor deus ex machinae wraps up two of the storylines. For every meticulous homage to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, for every brilliant “Soul Train” send-up (complete with what appears to be the entire cast of my favourite show as a kid, “CHiPs”), there’s a genuinely astonishing amount of dead air in which the characters deliver reams of stultifying exposition.
Consider a moment where Astrid talks about all the inappropriate Halloween costumes she wore as a kid, including the time she went as Munch’s The Scream, and how all of that’s related as a flat monologue instead of imagistically. Why Burton, the most twisted artist in Disney’s stable of aspiring animators, is choosing text over the kitchen sink is beyond me. Remember when Pee-Wee described his amazing bike in detail, but we never got to see it? Yeah, that would’ve been awful. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has about 30 minutes in it that are glorious. Keaton and Ryder have the chemistry of a classic stand-up team, an Abbott & Costello pitting incredulousness against obnoxiousness. Even better, it feels like an older brother doing his best to gross out his little sister, and there’s a real charm to their scenes together. Without a proper foil, the Beetlejuice character is just plaid in Canada. The first film had exurban couple the Maitlands, who were so square and cornfed they didn’t even know how to haunt a house. This one only has Lydia, and she’s kept apart from Beetlejuice for more than two-thirds of the film.
Poor Lydia, abandoned by her adoptive parents somewhere between the first two films, is widowed by a decent man, held as a charlatan by her estranged kid, and stuck in the predatory business of profiting off peoples’ belief in the afterlife on the arm of some creep transparently up to no good. What a fucking downer. At least she’s not a crazy, soul-sucking, maniacal, vengeful harridan looking to get back together with her abusive husband, I guess. There’s a masterpiece lurking in this film, one focused on what happens to a child raised by ghosts, one set entirely in the picture’s gorgeously realized bureaucratic afterlife, with its failing and over-burdened systems and well-meaning but utterly ineffectual human resources departments run by an absent God–which is, after all, the perfect metaphor for a CEO who makes a few thousand times what His workers do. More Pasolini, less Jason Reitman, please. In fact, I’ve seen it already, the possibilities for this premise to stretch into its gonzo potential: the four seasons of the “Beetlejuice” animated series. You should check ’em out.
