Can this movie actually overcome my nostalgia fatigue, my Tim Burton fatigue, and my Jenna Ortega fatigue all at once? Turns out that Beetlejuice may have a few tricks up his sleeve along with all of those snakes and spiders.
This is hardly a unique opinion, but I’m pretty exhausted by Hollywood’s current obsession with Gen X nostalgia-mining. Sure, you get the occasional winner, like Top Gun: Maverick, but you are usually treated to a hollow experience that spends more energy on stuffing in callbacks to the original movie than it does crafting a story that is compelling enough to justify its own existence. That’s one strike against Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. As for Tim Burton, I found him a uniquely creative and refreshing auteur in the late eighties and early nineties, just like everyone did when he was making movies like the original Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and A Nightmare Before Christmas. In the subsequent decades, he has become one of my least favorite directors. Some of that is familiarity – his aesthetic choices haven’t really evolved over the years, and when you combine that with his insistence on casting from the same troupe of actors (Johnny Depp, Helena Bohnam Carter) you start to feel like you’ve seen everything he has to offer too many times already. I also think that discovering CGI is the worst thing that ever happened to Burton, as he traded in a strength for charming gothic set design for a huge weakness in an overreliance on computer generated “whimsy”. From that point on, his work never really recovered in my eyes.
If you’re keeping count, that’s two strikes against this movie before I ever even stepped in the theater to watch it. Yet, it took almost no time for me to fall back under Burton’s spell like it was 1988 again. Some of that credit should go to Danny Elfman’s score, but my first impressions of the film were shaped by that magical, practical set design. It looked like Beetlejuice and more importantly it felt like Beetlejuice, and not just a recreation but an expansion of the universe. Then, it became clear that the tone was equally as reverent to the original, the sense of humor was the precise ratio of silly and macabre and witty. I went from skeptic to believer in the first few minutes of the film, and then it was just up to the performances and the plot not to screw it up. The performances did not let me down.
Allow me to pay lip service to Wynona Ryder and Willem Defoe and Jenna Ortega and the rest. They all did a commendable job, and I think its clear that they were having a lot of fun on set. I really can’t point to a poor performance in the film, and while I am a little bit over seeing the ubiquitous Ortega in such similar types of roles, she keeps getting these jobs for a reason. With that out of the way, I have to shout out the two performances that make the movie for me. First is, of course, Michael Keaton as the titular Beetlejuice. The original role was such an odd one for him in that nothing in his career would point to him being the obvious choice to play such a grotesque oddball, but he absolutely inhabited the character in a way that was more effective than anyone else could have hoped to do. It’s such a surprising performance in many ways. It’s like he could have pulled from so many sources of inspiration, but I am always struck by how he manages to craft something seemingly without precedent. Here, he steps back into the role like he has been playing it ever since. He gets to be both hero and villain, a fan favorite that the fans have no choice but to root against. He gets the single best laugh line in the entire movie as he tidies up one of the many plot threads in extremely satisfying fashion. Yet, Keaton’s may be my second favorite performance in the film.
Catherine O’Hara is a comedic titan. It’s a toss up between her and Wayne Gretzky as the greatest thing that Canada has ever produced. She is a master at playing characters whose defining trait is self-absorption yet imbuing them with a soul, a real streak of compassion and humanity that is both believable and doesn’t contradict their narcissistic tendencies. She probably started crafting that persona back in her “SCTV” days, but Delia Deetz is the role that truly begat Moira Rose and so many of her turns in Christopher Guest mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration. Here, she is mourning the untimely death of her husband and turning that into inspiration for her latest art installation, while attempting to help Rider mend her strained relationship with Ortega. Of course all of that is comedically filtered through Deetz’s manic narcissism, and O’Hara becomes the heart of a movie that needs a performance like hers to cut through all of the overstuffed plot strands.
As far as that plotting goes, there are so many storylines to serve in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that it is inevitable that some of them struggle to meet their full potential. You have the estranged mother/daughter relationship I mentioned, a budding romance for Ortega that has interesting complications, Rider’s agent and boyfriend pushing her into a marriage, O’Hara’s grief journey (that also has interesting complications), Monica Bellucci as an old flame of Beetlejuice who is double killing the already deceased, Willem Defoe as a dead actor turned afterlife PI who is on Bellucci’s trail, Ortega dealing with abandonment issues brought on by her missing father, and Beetlejuice bouncing around all of those plot strands while also trying to rekindle his one-sided romance with Rider. I’ve even left out some spoilers and probably forgotten some others. I actually enjoyed most if not all of these story elements, at least as they were set up. By the third act, however, the movie simply couldn’t keep up with them all and some of the resolutions completely fizzled. Yet, I can’t really be mad at it. I had so much fun and, yes, feelings of nostalgia, while watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that it is easy for me to overlook its flaws. I’m sure we’ll be seeing another sequel, and it won’t be another 25 years in the making, so we’ll see sooner than later if there will be diminishing returns as we revisit this universe again. Certainly, it seems like they’ve already used up all of the ideas in this one. Based on how successful I found the second entry into the franchise against all odds, however, I’ll be first in line to give Beetlejuice another shot.
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