Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Twice the Fun, Twice the Chaos

I’ll admit, I entered the press screening for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with some apprehension. We’ve been subjected to a glut of mid-to-horrible reboots this past decade, movies stuffed to the gills with ham-fisted callbacks to their originals in clumsy attempts at nostalgia bait. But after almost three decades of production hell, the movie that will make Beetlejuice a Capital F Franchise turns out to be a delightful ride of chaos.

It’s 36 years since the events that took place in Beetlejuice, and co-writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar make quick work of letting us know where our beloved characters are now. We open on Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), bangs as spiky as ever, hosting a live taping session of her paranormal investigation series. Her run of show is interrupted by the news that her father has died, charmingly illustrated in an animated sequence showing his plane crashing and a shark eating him.

Without further ado, Lydia, her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, everyone’s favorite drama queen), and Lydia’s wormy boyfriend/show producer Rory (Justin Theroux with a hideously perfect little ponytail) set off for that old town of Winter River for the funeral. Along the way they grab Lydia’s angsty teen daughter Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega with her usual wry maturity.

Much to its credit, the new Beetlejuice avoids obvious script references to the original and instead alludes to its predecessor through visuals. The sweeping shots of Winter River in the opening credits, zooming into the model town just like the original, makes it feel like you’re coming home after a many-decades-long journey. Tim Burton has a lot of iconic houses in his filmography, and that stark white country home atop the hill—shrouded in filmy black cloth per Delia’s grieving process and set to a children’s choir singing a funereal version of “Day-O”—is just as delightful as the first time you saw it. Burton is firmly back in his territory with the help of crisp visuals from cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, injecting autumn directly into his audience’s veins by way of Northeastern fall palates and the Halloween oranges, purples, and blacks of the Afterlife.

Speaking of, what about Betelgeuse himself? Returning fans will be pleased to find Michael Keaton’s Betelgeuse just as crusty and irreverent as ever. Now presiding over an office full of shrunken-headed minions to do his bio-exorcism bidding, Betelgeuse still stokes the fire of his tendre for Lydia, popping up every so often to spook her. He’s thrilled to find out she’s returning to Winter River, and less so to learn his dead ex-wife Delores (a very sensual and imposing Monica Bellucci) has frankensteined herself back together in order to track him down and suck out his soul. (Yes, Betelgeuse gives us a couple of sucking jokes.) We get a lot of fun gross-out visual effects from Betelgeuse, Delores, and the other dead spirits, and Betelgeuse’s penchant for theatricality is put to good use throughout the movie with elaborate dream sequences and musical numbers.

Between the funeral, Lydia’s struggles to come to terms with her past, a surprise proposal from Rory, Astrid’s unresolved anger about her father’s death, an arthouse approach to grief from Delia, and Betelgeuse’s usual antics, there’s more than enough to fill out the plot. Unfortunately, Gough et al. decide to throw in unnecessary additional storylines that detract from the relationships at play. Astrid’s character development in particular ends up feeling like an entire season of a teen mystery series. She’s introduced by way of getting bullied by girls at her boarding school, develops a crush on a neighborhood boy in Winter River, and gets wrapped up in her own supernatural misadventure. And Willem Dafoe joins Monica Bellucci in feeling shoehorned into an overstuffed script. They’re both excellent in their Afterlife roles, with Dafoe as admittedly a very funny action-star-turned-ghost-cop Wolf Jackson, but their scenes and the many, many subplots leave no room for anything to breathe. 

There’s a frenzied nature to the film as it careens from scene to scene, but it’s anchored by its heart and genuine love for these characters. When you push aside the cobwebs of side plots, the movie centers on mending two generations of mother-daughter relationships. Delia and Lydia reminisce about their contentious beginnings in a way that only feels slightly like a recap of the old movie, with Delia encouraging Lydia to find herself and move on from her past and Lydia bemoaning that she ever treated Delia like Astrid treats her now. And it’s genuinely moving to watch Lydia go from a haunted, pill-popping, codependent woman to showing flashes of her younger self’s bravada, as she and Astrid work together to banish their ghosts back to where they belong. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ends up feeling weighed down by plot, but it’s still a breath of fresh air in the reboot era. The script nimbly avoids common franchise pitfalls while giving new life to old characters. And at the end of the day, I’d rather have an overambitious sequel with heart than a franchise that feels like a ghost of its former self.

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