By Jake Wilson
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE ★★★½
(M) 104 minutes
Death in the work of Tim Burton tends to be a joyous occasion, at least for the filmmaker. As a rule, it’s less an end than a beginning – a chance for Burton to keep experimenting with ways the human body can be mutilated, dismantled or otherwise transformed.
Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) reunite in Tim Burton’s long-delayed sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
That goes double for the bureaucratic afterlife revisited in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-delayed sequel to Burton’s beloved horror-comedy Beetlejuice (his second feature, released way back in 1988). This is a very physical vision of the next world, the denizens of which resemble corpses in varying stages of decay. If you die getting chomped in half by a shark or burnt to a cinder, you stay chomped or burnt, at least until it’s time for you to climb on the Soul Train and embark on your final destination in the Great Beyond.
The childlike literalness of all this allows Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the clownish ghoul who serves as master of ceremonies, to communicate mainly in gruesome visual puns. If he gives you his heart, he’s going to rip it right out of his chest. And if he spills his guts … well, I don’t have to draw you a picture, although Burton undoubtedly would be glad to.
From the Beetlejuice films alone, it wouldn’t be difficult to guess that Burton started out as an animator. As a mainstream Hollywood director since the 1980s, he’s been faced with an ongoing challenge: how far is it possible to bring the same kind of weightless absurdity to live-action feature filmmaking while telling a story that makes a degree of sense?
Catherine O’Hara as Delia, Jenna Ortega as Astrid, Winona Ryder as Lydia and Justin Theroux as Rory in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
For good or ill, there’s a lot of plot in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, scripted by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the showrunners of Burton’s TV hit Wednesday. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the Goth teen heroine of the first film, has parlayed her gift of second sight into an outwardly thriving career as a TV medium, to the disgust of her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).
Also come up in the world is Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), once a pretentious sculptor, now a pretentious multimedia artist in the Marina Abramović mould. Jeffrey Jones doesn’t return as Lydia’s bird-watcher father, but his character’s demise supplies an excuse for all three generations of Deetz women to reunite at the creaky hilltop family home where it all began.
Meanwhile, in the hereafter, the prominently featured players aside from Beetlejuice himself include a deceased movie star turned supernatural cop (Willem Dafoe) and a soul-sucking femme fatale (Monica Bellucci) in the tradition of the Bride of Frankenstein, as well as an army of pinhead office drones with the stricken look of Beaker from The Muppet Show.
Much of the incidental satire is directed at evasive sentimentality around death and at high-flown new age bromides in general, usually uttered by O’Hara or Justin Theroux as Lydia’s smarmy boyfriend Rory, who we know is a bad guy because he assumes the all-too-real Beetlejuice is just a metaphor for trauma.
Yet, the film has a sentimental streak, finally offering itself as a heartwarming story about grief, healing and the power of family bonds. Ryder is almost too earnestly committed to playing Lydia as a damaged soul: little trace remains of the earlier version of the character, the theatrical young rebel who proudly declared, “I, myself, am strange and unusual.”
But whenever schmaltz threatens to take over, Burton is always ready to rupture the tone with one more morbid gag. Coherence may not be his strong point, but as he’s always known, disintegration has its charms.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is released in cinemas on September 5.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.