The juice is loose and the Burton is back in a gloriously practical, puppet-filled ride which doesn’t coast on its past successes. Here’s our Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review.
In an interview with Variety last month, Tim Burton had a few words to say about Disney.
His new film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, has a few more. But even ignoring the movie’s digs at Disney princesses and an uncharacteristically long absence from cinemas, the follow-up to his 1988 cult classic feels like the director exorcising a few demons after a period tied more to other people’s projects (Dumbo, Wednesday) than his own. It’s been a long while since Burton made something considered a classic – for many, it seems like he’s approaching his newest film with something to prove. Is he still the filmmaker who launched a thousand goth phases?
But if Burton is feeling the pressure on his latest production, he isn’t showing it. Instead, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sees the director having more fun than he has in years. Picking up the story of the original 35 years on, Winona Ryder’s Lydia has grown up into a TV medium with a teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega) rolling her eyes behind the scenes. When Lydia’s father, Charles, dies in a surprisingly grisly birdwatching accident, the pair reunite with Catherine O’Hara’s Delia for a funeral in the shadow of the first film’s wooden gothic homestead.
The plot, truthfully, doesn’t get much more focused than that. It jumps off in some typically Burton-esque directions – rescue a character from the afterlife, beat Mom’s slimy new boyfriend, and try not to get soul-sucked by Beetlejuice’s ex-wife – but there’s a chaotic lightness that suggests the creators are less concerned with telling a story so much as revisiting the therapeutic playground of Burton’s imagination.
So many moments of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, from the hilariously tragic fates of the afterlife’s inhabitants to stop-motion reenactments and lip-synced musical numbers, feel like a kind of creative therapy not just for Burton, but for us too. A fantastical world stuffed with hilariously gothic puppetry and gore gives imagination its purest kind of outlet. As sequels to 80s IP go, the film doesn’t have a cynical bone in its recently deceased body. Everyone involved is simply having too much fun.
And much like a certain in-film plague, that fun is contagious. The clunky plot and moments of borderline unintelligibility from Michael Keaton are easily forgiven. New characters, from Justin Theroux’s therapy-speaking boyfriend to Burn Gorman’s quietly fire-and-brimstone-style priest treat the modern setting with the same absurd lightness as the 1988 original. Jenna Ortega recaptures the teen-movie spirit she brought to the Scream franchise, and Keaton’s unpredictable delivery in the title role is occasionally baffling but (almost) always entertaining. Take a bow, though, Catherine O’Hara, whose ludicrously artsy stepmom manages to steal every scene she’s in.
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But as much as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels like a celebration of creativity, the fact it exists at all is tinged with a certain kind of melancholy. Though it borrows less liberally from its predecessor than plenty of examples in recent memory (Burton insists he didn’t re-watch the 1988 film before starting the project), a film as playful and practical as this a full decade from the director’s last original project can’t help but highlight how unlikely anything like the original Beetlejuice could break through today. Sometimes, the studio executives in the suits might be right – if this film didn’t have Beetlejuice in the title, there’s no chance anyone would be flocking to see it in the cinema.
More than 35 years after the bio-exorcist’s debut, Burton has proved that he might just be the same filmmaker he always was. It’s us, the audience, who’ve changed.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas 6th September.
