Some filmmakers blossom when their audiences pronounce them great. Others respond by letting their worst impulses fly free, which seems to be what happened to Tim Burton: Over the past two decades or so his movies have become less flights of unhinged fancy than stolid exercises in imaginativeness. But something has shaken loose in him with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which kicks off the 81st Venice International Film Festival. (It opens in theaters Sept. 6.) This sequel to Burton’s 1988 cracked pop masterpiece Beetlejuice doesn’t strive for greatness, or even your garden-variety over-the-top fantastical vision. Instead, Burton has just allowed himself to be silly and have fun; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is filled with low-stakes wisecracks and kindergarten-style one-liners, but the effect works. The movie carries you along on its wriggling magic carpet of mayhem—and features one sequence of creepy-elegant-funny cracked poetry that’s classic, old-school Burton. You could ask for more; but over the years, as Burton has unfurled tepid spinoffs and live-action remakes (Dark Shadows, Dumbo), his fans have had to settle for much less.
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The story hangs loose, but the plot mechanics don’t matter much. The teenage ghost whisperer of the first film, Lydia Deetz—again played by Winona Ryder, who easily reconnects with her old goth kid energy—is now an adult with her own successful talk show: she investigates haunted houses and tries to broker peace between their owners and the specters who refuse to vacate the premises. She’s successful in her career but extremely neurotic, relying on her producer/boyfriend (an oily Justin Theroux) to keep her calm. Then her gloriously self-centered stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) informs her that her father has died in a plane crash—or, rather, he’s been chomped to death by a shark after a plane crash. (Here Charles Deetz, played by Jeffrey Jones in the first movie, is represented first in cartoon form and later as a hapless, headless ghoul wandering through the afterlife.) Lydia dreads breaking the news to her disaffected daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), when she collects her from boarding school. Astrid adored her grandfather—she saw him as the only normal person in the family—and she resents her mother: Lydia is unable to connect with the spirit of Astrid’s late father, which leads Astrid to think her supernatural capabilities are fake.
There’s a lot of plot windup before Beetlejuice, the “trickster demon,” as Lydia describes him, shows up. But when he does, it’s like greeting a decrepit, kvetching old friend, the kind you keep around just for entertainment value. Michael Keaton clearly adores this character; once again, he pours pure love into Beetlejuice’s maniacal, depraved soul. His sooty eyes speak of centuries’ worth of sleepless nights, the mark of an opportunistic fiend who lives for dreaming up new ways of tormenting hapless humans. His five o’clock shadow looks to be left over from the 5th century, and his hair is artfully uncombed, as if his hairdressing secret were a fork and an electrical socket. He has a dirty mind but a somewhat tame tongue. (The film is rated PG-13.) He’s still pissed off that his marriage to the then-teenage Lydia was thwarted some three decades ago; he carps that she’s been ignoring him all this time. Worse yet, he’s also being hounded by an ex-wife—more on her later. As he describes their blissful wedding day—in florid subtitled Italian, no less—we see it play out in grainy-gorgeous, low-budget black-and-white: “The ceremony was traditional: we drank each other’s blood, bit the heads off chickens, sacrificed a goat.” Good times!
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is full of loopy little touches like that. (The screenplay is by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith.) There are the usual Burtony grossouts: you can guess what happens when Beetlejuice, feigning a vulnerable moment, decides to “spill his guts.” Danny Devito and Willem Dafoe show up in gruesomely amiable minor roles. The production design riffs on that of the earlier film: the stripy pop-art sandworm returns; the jagged hallways leading to the afterlife have the same wonky German Expressionist angles. The movie’s centerpiece is a gonzo operatic tableau set to the Richard Harris version of what is possibly the greatest terrible song of all time, Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.” You can pretty much guess what Burton, a guy who knows his way around a fried eyeball, does with the line “Never let you catch me looking at the sun.”
Best of all, though, is the entrance Burton gives Monica Bellucci as the soul-sucking knockout Delores, who has come back to nonlife for revenge against Beetlejuice, the ex who did her dirty. Centuries ago, their ill-fated affair had caused her, in a manner of speaking, to fall apart. She now gets a chance to reassemble herself, piece by piece, with the help of a staple gun. Then she sweeps off into the night, in a décolletage-bearing black whisper of a gown, to wreak her vengeance. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could use more Delores: she pops up, elegantly, only here and there. But when she does, the movie veers into a gothic-horror reverie. Her zig-zag stapled face, resplendent as a Japanese bowl repaired with gold, is a nod not just to Boris Karloff’s OG Frankenstein’s monster, but also to the great Burton creations he inspired, like Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride’s Sally Finkelstein. She’s the face of amour fou, imperfectly perfect in every way, the dream-nightmare you know you ought to run from. Good luck with that.
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