In honour of Halloween, I thought I’d check out yet another 80s classic I’ve never watched before, a ghoulish supernatural comedy from Tim Burton that may be slight on story and characters but is still utterly charming and inventive.
I had no idea that the movie’s stacked cast included Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who play Adam and Barbara Maitland, a likeable couple living in a spacious New England country home. Their contented lives come to an abrupt end when they happen to die in a very silly road accident involving a small dog. They find themselves trapped in their house as ghosts, with a surreal desert hellscape waiting for them should they step outside, and a cryptic Handbook for the Recently Deceased as their only guide in the afterlife.
The Maitlands are surprisingly chill about being dead, and in fact are far more distressed by the insufferable yuppie couple from New York who move in as the new owners (Catherine O’Hara and Jefferey Jones). The Deetzes, especially wife Delia, a pretentious wannabe sculptor, are set on giving their house a garish makeover with the help of their snooty decorator. Getting stuck with them for what could be years feels like a fate worse than death, even if the Deetzes’ black-sheep teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder, cute as a button) might actually be sympathetic to their plight.
Unfortunately, the Maitlands are just too nice and meek to scare away the intruders all by themselves. Enter Betelgeuse a.k.a. Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a lecherous, obnoxious and rambunctious spirit, an agent of chaos and a self-proclaimed bio-exorcist. In a reversal of a haunted house tale, he offers the Maitlands his services in getting rid of those annoying pesky humans, but is he more trouble than it’s worth? Michael Keaton steals the entire movie with his manic, creeptastic and outrageous performance, but the film is also wise enough to contain his appearances to a handful of scenes where he never becomes wearisome.
Tim Burton has often been accused of being style over substance, and as much as I liked Beetlejuice I wouldn’t say that it proves otherwise. The movie plays like a stream of ideas and kooky scenes rather than a well-conceived narrative with meaningful character development, and its third act threatens to go off the rails for good. It flirts with a couple of threads like Lydia’s alienation and the Maitlands’ implied desire for children of their own, but any emotional weight the movie has is thanks to the excellent cast rather than writing.
Sometimes however style and execution is quite enough to win you over. I found the movie delightful, overflowing with visual invention, snappy dark comedy and zany energy, and its brisk pace, together with the perfect comedy runtime, works very much in its favour. In fact its lack of polish and rough-around-the-edges quality, including charmingly dated practical effects and puppetry, feels strangely endearing.
Burton’s gothic sensibility and whimsical style has become rather tired in recent years, so it’s impressive that Beetlejuice still feels like it’s bursting with the energy of a young director, with a million new ideas crammed in his head. Some of its best scenes take place in the afterlife’s waiting room, a macabre bureaucracy populated with waiting souls who all seem to have suffered grisly deaths. In this version of life after death, your existence is full of the same mundane problems, including interminable queuing and bad-tempered civil servants.
I don’t know if I’m interested in the recent sequel, but I think I’ll be quite happy to give Beetlejuice a rewatch when the next spooky season comes along.
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