The release of a new Tim Burton film prompts any number of critical referendums on the filmmaker’s work and legacy. For critics of a certain age (including this one), Burton’s forthrightness of vision — sometimes manifesting as a lazy obviousness of tendency — was instructive for learning to watch a film for its maker’s hand, on its maker’s terms. Is he the first auteur many viewers can obviously point to, charting fussy tactility and Gothic panache alike? Early works freely cocktail familiar troupe members with Elfman elocutions for some of the most banally nightmarish Americana to emerge post-Sirk. Later films, as predetermined (and accurate…) narrative arcs would have it, suffer from a pervasive flatness of vision and visualization. While digital filmmaking may in fact have broken Burton’s brain, the reality is probably that he’s the same filmmaker he’s always been: occasionally inspired by the way a screwy world can be animated via cinema as corkscrew, occasionally unable to imagine motion pictures outside of his pre-established terms.
It’s this exact intersection that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) inhabits. That it is literally a revisitation is no surprise for any filmgoer who’s spent time in a multiplex in the last two decades: there’s enough of the familiar — right down to a third-act lip sync, as well as a Belafonte needle-drop spoiled by the legacy-happy trailer — to ensure a certain comfort food quality. That the film is also Burton’s most jankily inventive is perhaps more surprising, a quality due to its complete lack of interest in anything resembling cohesive narrative structure. What happens in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice? The film is near-literally about never getting over having a crush on Winona Ryder. In this way, the film engages with the universal. Patriarch Charles (played in the first film by Jeffrey Jones, here represented by an awkward mixture of animated recreation and digital likenesses, the wrong kind of cake and eating) dies, sending the three generations of Deetz women back to the family house and back to the set — basically literally — of Beetlejuice (1988).
Lydia, now using her spirit medium powers (?) on a hack-television program is pseudo-engaged to its showrunner and producer, Rory (Justin Theroux, on hand to channel the original’s Glenn Shadix), a relationship scorned by daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, asked uncharitably to perform detachment, leading to a decidedly boring performance from a decidedly unboring actor), as well as stepmother Lydia (Catherine O’Hara, uncharitably asked to perform what can only be described as Catherine O’Hara drag.) Other events occur, surely: Astrid falls for a boy (Athur Conti, British) with a secret; Lydia must reconcile being a mother; the two women must reconcile with Richard, the beloved-departed father/husband. Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe also appear in the film. What is their narrative function? To be Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe.
This last point reads as critical flippancy, though it need not be: there is great pleasure in moving eyeballs around a movie screen containing actors like Bellucci and Dafoe gamely indulging Burton’s Goth-doll play. And as the sequel shaggily adds and subtracts characters and narrative strands, it’s possible to view it less as a continuation of “the story of Beetlejuice” and more as a kind of half-forgotten Disney-brand dark ride, a conveyor belt flinging sub-Munsters (2022) prop worm-spaghetti at a wall to see what craven image remains in the fallout. Occasionally, as when Bellucci staples herself back together in a sequence 50 seconds too long (inspired) or Dafoe drags his chosen profession better than any role this side of both Pasolini (2014) or Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007), the film attains a kind of gleeful non-narrative stupidity. (“Making sense” is, from one angle, the tool that MBA grads in screenwriter suits use to talk down to the universal spectator’s dwindled attention span.) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has just enough good taste to not insult the spectator who, like Burton, merely receives pleasure from weird guys being a little gross, a little nasty. Of the ghoul especially, time remains kind: Keaton proves again why his gummy blurring of broad comedy with serio-psycho pathos is a vital cinematic force. It’s not by accident that Beetlejuice provides Burton his crankiest outlet, as cheap shots at talk therapy and social media influencers alike feel less like blasé complaints about modernity than they are genuinely venomous lobs at a theoretical multiplex crowd. Keaton provides Burton an edge which, if minor, is something he hasn’t worked with in nearly two decades.
But to be sure: Burton has lost any sense of the immediacy that made him one of the more interesting Disney dropouts to make studio films in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The path to praising Beetlejuice Beetlejuice means ignoring the way it writes its female leads into dud performances in order to highlight sizzle-reel images excerpted from their narrative momentum; means that the film has none of its predecessor’s swagger; and means it has none the original’s genuine contempt for the American suburb. Burton has always proven a nastier storyteller than folks remember: Beetlejuice sought to subsume Connecticut heterotopia to a man ghoul horned up for the teenage Lydia Deetz. There, Lydia exudes contempt for the cookie cut, but when presented with a genuine alternative, the lines between fantasy and nightmare bubble. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice can’t detonate its looney-tunacy toward any such edge because it presents no argument for its characters to have with themselves. It provides no terrain for them to tease out desire, even and especially their most lurid ones.
DIRECTOR: Tim Burton; CAST: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros.; IN THEATERS: September 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
