For one of the most distinct visual stylists in film—a director whose images are uniquely indelible—Tim Burton has always been something of a prisoner to his screenplays.
His best movies—even his best-looking ones—have a strong narrative propping them up: Edward Scissorhands, written by Burton and Caroline Thompson; Ed Wood, written by the team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; Big Fish, which John August adapted from the novel by Daniel Wallace. These films look like something only Burton could have made, but they’re supported by universal storytelling elements such as strong character development and disciplined plot structure.
The script should be the last thing one thinks about when it comes to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton’s sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice (itself one of his best, most visually distinctive efforts). But the screenplay, by the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, is at once overstuffed—in this it resembles Burton’s Dark Shadows—and full of missed opportunities.
Among these is what should have been the film’s focus: the relationship between Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz—a morose, snarky, ghost-seeing teen in the first film and now the host of a supernatural reality show—and her daughter Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega. The two are estranged at the start of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, partly because Astrid is a skeptic, yet their relationship is poorly established and barely fleshed out. What’s worse, the adult Lydia we meet here is dithering and helpless—nothing like the depressed, yet smart and clever kid from the first film—for reasons that are never fully explained.
One of the movie’s many subplots tries to make something of Lydia’s state—Justin Theroux is on hand as Lydia’s manipulative manager and insistent romantic interest—but the entire thread feels extraneous. As does the returning presence of Catherine O’Hara as Lydia’s egotistical, installation-artist stepmother. (When a genius of improvisation like O’Hara can’t make her scenes work, you know there’s something wrong with the material.) On top of this, Astrid gets a romantic interest when a death in the family brings everyone back to the rural village from the first film and she meets a fellow, disaffected loner (Arthur Conti). Oh yeah, and Willem Dafoe has a good chunk of screen time as a Netherworld cop.
All of this and I haven’t even gotten to the title character: Michael Keaton’s “trickster demon,” a ribald prankster gleefully causing trouble in the Netherworld, in hopes of getting into the land of the living. Beetlejuice looks the same—I’ll always love the touch of mold getting ahold of his hairline—and Keaton reflexively revives the character’s familiar grins, groans, and grimaces. Yet there’s no denying a certain speed is missing from the performance. The key to Keaton in the 1980s was the way his characters were often intellectually, verbally and physically moving in multiple directions at once, never more so than as this ADHD demon.
Still, Beetlejuice is a welcome, unwelcome sight, as is newcomer Monica Bellucci as Delores, his “soul-sucking” ex-wife. This should be another unnecessary plot development, but in its macabre details—there’s an amusing, black-and-white flashback to the Black Plague, when they first met—it allows Burton and his creative team to indulge in the goth visuals for which he’s best known. (The scene of Delores, who died by dismemberment, stapling her body parts together is a ghoulish riff on Selina Kyle’s revival by cats in Batman Returns.) Delores, Beetlejuice, Astrid, and Lydia were all this movie needed. Instead, the juice is diffuse.
(9/4/2023)
