BEETLEJUICE
1988
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, and Warren Skaaren
In speaking of any Golden Age of Tim Burton, almost everyone agrees it begins immediately in 1985 with his first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, so somewhat by definition it would include his second, Beetlejuice. And by many metrics, Beetlejuice itself is the real beginning of Burton's ascendancy, quintupling its budget with a $75 million take, which was only the start for Beetlejuice (it spawned soon afterwards a successfully-reimagined cartoon series that, to my recollection, was much better than "cash-in" indicates), and there's a better-than-even chance that if you attached somebody to a car battery and demanded they name twenty 80s movies, Beetlejuice would shortly issue from their lips. Eventually, its nostalgic status would be confirmed with a thirty-six-years-later sequel, not necessarily conclusive evidence of a tremendous affection—"affection" isn't a hard prerequisite for IPsploitation anymore—but the almost half-billion dollars it grossed is. And yet I find Beetlejuice slightly inconvenient, complicating the narrative I also want to have about an almost-incomparably consistent run of great films that inaugurated Burton's career, because I would be ignoring way too many objections, not to mention a distinct feeling of dishonesty, to push myself to a place where I would call this movie I've seen at least a half-dozen times actually great.
There's little denying that the idea is great, though. What scenarists and co-screenwriters Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson had come up with for the movie that Burton eventually directed was, essentially, a parody of ghost stories in general, and horror cinema as it had taken shape in the 1980s in particular—there's probably more Poltergeist here than anything else, but in several specific details, the blaringly obvious touchstone was The Shining—and it's just such a cleverly unnatural inversion of horror storytelling. It's this: what if it were the living who haunted the dead, with the living's penchant for entering spaces that hadn't belonged to them and acting like, get this, they owned the place, spoiling the accumulated memories and wrecking the monuments to what had come before. Beyond that, it's a twist on No Exit—what if hell were spending eternity with cartoonishly annoying strangers, but you find out they're so stupid and asinine you can barely even annoy them back? That in turn automatically suggests the second half of their idea, the inverse of every horror movie where they bring in the experts to dispel the intruders from the other side—though as far as I can determine McDowell & Wilson hadn't coined the term "bio-exorcist" yet—but now the expert is, basically, the devil. Which is almost as clever as the foundational idea, if perhaps not as clever, at least when the tagline for Beetlejuice absolutely could have been "who you gonna call?", but it turned out that was already taken.
Thirty-eight years on, it cannot be very surprising that Burton found its light morbidity appealing, or that, with Batman presently going nowhere, he jumped aboard at McDowell and Wilson's invitation, having previously collaborated with them on TV, presumably pulling Warner Bros. in with him (McDowell & Wilson, rejected by their actual present employer Universal, had sold their script to Geffen). However, this entailed a third screenwriter, Warren Skaaren (what a handle), and while a whole lot that makes Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—ahem—happened only after Burton and Skaaren entered the picture, I'm eventually going to circle back to my supposition that they never actually finished writing Beetlejuice. Sometimes in ways you'd think at least the actors referring to things which never happened should've noticed.
But for now, we have the movie we have, and the flesh and non-meat-based ectoplasmic material it puts on those bones, so let us cast our eyes to the smalltown rusticity of Winter River, Connecticut, home of Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alex Baldwin), an excessively pleasant married couple presently having a staycation from their unidentified jobs and enjoying every second of it, except for the badgering of the local real estate agent (Annie McEnroe) who won't stop trying to get their big quaint country home on the market. But she'll get her way soon enough, and on a routine shopping trip downtown they drive right off a bridge and into a creek, which doesn't look all that fatal, but then neither does the bedraggled couple reentering their house with sarcastic comments about their great day, which seems like—and I even faintly recall, for my younger self, it was!—an outstanding little misdirect, if you somehow didn't already know the plot. For the Maitlands are dead. These are only their spirits, as they soon realize from their inability to reflect light and so forth. They also realize that these walls are now the boundaries of their existence, and they find out the hard way that, although they can see outside, any attempt to go outside results in spilling out into a desert wasteland populated by demoniac sandworms; but then, they find most things out the hard way, because they aren't very diligent about reading the Handbook For the Recently Deceased the afterlife's left out for them. Well, the Maitlands' limbo isn't ideal but also not so bad—Adam loves his wife very much, and if she's more dissatisfied for certain reasons going back to their biological existences cut short without an offspring, it's not Adam's fault, and she doesn't blame him—but things get worse when their house is, inevitably, sold.
The buyers are the Deetzes: Wall Street type Charles (Jeffrey Jones), his wife, the kind of modern artist type who would marry a Wall Street type, Delia (Catherine O'Hara), and Charles's daughter by his first marriage, surly goth teen Lydia (Winona Ryder). Delia disdains being moved and despises the house so, with the assistance of her interior decorator and spiritual advisor Otho (Glenn Shadix), begins the demolition almost right away, ultimately turning the Maitlands' cute, unassuming old house into a total 80s nightmare; thus do Barbara and Adam determine to get rid of these living interlopers. Unfortunately, the afterlife bureaucracy isn't terribly helpful, so they're easier marks than they should be for a representative of the afterlife's private sector, the incorrigible, grifting, and fundamentally-evil Beetlejuice* (Michael Keaton).
This brings us to a question of what to say first, and whether I want to talk about what Beetlejuice does well and the reasons it is a more-or-less canonized classic, or the reasons it's actually fucked-up and broken in ways that matter almost as much as its exercise in style does. And since this is a chastisement of looking at it through the rose (or puke-green) tinted glasses of Burton nostalgia as much as it is a celebration of his achievement, we ought to save the bad for last. So there are the littler good things, one being the cast this borderline-B-movie got that feels like it's still full of enormous stars simply because they mostly weren't enormous stars yet—this was Baldwin's big year, and Ryder's first role of any prominence—which would've helped keep Beetlejuice in the public consciousness even if they weren't good, and they are all good, Davis and Baldwin doing real work on behalf of a couple effectively defined by how boringly normal they are, leaning into lightly-caricatured overemphasis to put up a single, fun, likeable personality between them. Meanwhile, there's nothing lightly-caricatured about O'Hara's fearsome stereotype of a yuppie super-bitch who's somehow entirely a status performance and entirely un-self-aware simultaneously, and there's no denying her commitment to the bit is the engine for an impressive fraction of this movie.
Jones, I don't think, ever entirely makes sense of a character pulled in two or even three different directions (Delia's counterpart, Delia's victim, and sitcom dad parody all in turn), but Ryder's stronger than her role seems to permit, winding up (somewhat by default) as the "human center" to the nonsense, along with serving as a scaffold for what costume designer Aggie Guerard Rogers, obviously under Burton's close supervision, is doing with cinema's most iconic goth up to the filming of this movie, though now I'm tacking into "visuals" and I don't want to do that yet. After all, when it comes to "Beetlejuice" and "acting" what you'd likeliest be talking about is Keaton, overshadowing a movie he's kind of barely in, though one of the things I genuinely adore about the (shooting) script is keeping the title character an unseen force for so long, so when Keaton does emerge from his grave, blasting Baldwin and Davis's Rockwellian doofuses off the screen with sinister prop comic energy and absolute slabs of dialogue getting delivered at 3x speed (just for instance: "I'VE SEEN THE EXORCIST ABOUT 167 TIMES AND IT KEEPS. GETTING. FUNNIER. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.", typographic flourish all in the original—remarkably, considering that he really is putting those staccato beats into it at 3x speed—but there's just no way to truly reflect in print the pervert's growl that sounds like Keaton's swallowed a bucket of gravel before every take), it all truly does convince you that Beetlejuice is the apocalyptic threat all the afterlife functionaries keep saying he is, so in no wise should you succumb to the temptation to invoke him, no matter how easy it would be to say his name three times.
But, of course, there are those visuals, and as clearly as I perceive a fully-operational Burton style on Pee-wee's Big Adventure already, even I'll concede that merging his kitsch sensibilities with Paul Reubens's would camouflage that somewhat, while we're getting the pure, uncut shit now. Even so, at this early stage, perhaps discipline was imposed upon him—unlike, frankly, every subsequent Burton movie until Ed Wood and most thereafter, Beetlejuice sets a baseline of something like reality—though even this gets an uncanny touch thanks to our introduction to "Winter River" being the model town Adam's built in his attic (a Burtonesque gesture, we should clarify, that was dictated even by the earliest forms this screenplay took). Yet once reality is gone, it's gone, and Burton's foremost interest in Beetlejuice, clearly, was his flipped-on-its-head vision of a celestial bureaucracy film from the 1940s, with a cosmology that offers no God but plenty of room for grotesquerie, thanks to its civil servants and their supplicants alike being apparently all drawn from the ranks of the violently-dead, spirits permanently twisted into the physical forms their bodies took in their last moments of life, hence a potentially-infinite well for body horror presented as morbid japery. The best, I think, is probably the office manager, flattened by a truck, who now ambulates by the workings of a hoist, with Burton's favorite, given he ends the movie with him, probably being the great white hunter waiting in the anteroom for a century after being cranially-shrunken by South Seas magic. (Or is it the smoker, who exhales through her slit throat? These are all terrific choices.) But then, this doesn't encompass the mortification these spiritual bodies still remain capable of after death, our pleasant married couple having more than one occasion to give any little kids watching a week's worth of nightmares. (It shocked me, honestly, to see this movie was only rated PG—in 1988, fully four years after Temple of Doom and Gremlins occasioned the new PG-13—though I was most shocked of all because I hadn't realized there was ever a time you could say "fucking," even once, in a PG film. Disney's really been letting us down!)
And this isn't even close to whole show, and maybe not even the most important thing to Burton himself, the former stop-motion animator turning his comparatively small budget into as much mid-century matinee aesthetic as possible, all of its juddery creatures and all of its baldly-obvious compositing, sometimes with the body horror, sometimes with Beetlejuice's depredations (notably his enlistment of Delia's godawful modern sculptures as assistant monsters—one of the oddnesses of the movie is that I'm not convinced Burton thinks Delia does have bad taste—which all become semi-subtle 50s sci-fi horror references), but it's especially present in the dreamlike horror of the wasteland dimension outside. (Like with the town model, I was surprised to know that the sandworms weren't Burton's addition, though their resemblance to the sockpuppet snakes of "Vincent" clearly is.) Maybe above all, there's the nauseating colorfulness of the offices of the dead, with Burton and DP Thomas Ackerman more-or-less inventing Halloween Express and to no small degree the whole damned "90s hell" aesthetic here, and all right before our eyes, with their spotlights of sickly green and their sheets of stark neon colors carving up the afterlife into a whimsically-spooky kaleidoscope. (So forget Keaton: my absolute favorite joke in the whole movie belongs to Baldwin and Davis, whom in the midst of the dire warnings re: Beetlejuice provided by the Maitlands' caseworker (Sylvia Sidney), Burton has directed to actually react to Ackerman's deployment of, apparently, diegetic infernal red gels.) It was also the first of Burton's collaborations with production designer Bo Welch—one of only three, this, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns, i.e. reasonable choices (possibly my choices) for Burton's coolest-looking movies—and if we can say they brought out the best in each other, in Beetlejuice's afterlife bureaucracy, Welch is realizing Burton's architectural predilections towards expressionistic craziness, and after Barbara and Adam come back, thanks to the different progressions of time between dimensions, their now-unrecognizable house isn't much less of an expressionistic monstrosity, except now it's tacky, too. And, obviously, the Burtonesque wouldn't be its fullest self without composer Danny Elfman, but he's back from Big Adventure and offering an even darker carnival.
So all of this works on the level of "this great filmmaker is making his mark," except for the script, which seems to have been in a constant state of unreadiness, and while Skaaren's final draft must be held to have been technically filmable, because they filmed it, it still wasn't complete. The early McDowell & Wilson draft I read is a tad more coherent, but very obviously needed work; the movie is evidence of the huge planned renovation they just didn't get around to; if Barbarba referencing a mutilation that no longer occurred during her accident could slip by you, her constant description of the 16 year old as "little girl" won't, because originally Lydia was two characters, one the (actual) little girl who could see the Maitlands (if it was either this or the supernatural tabletop model in the Maitlands' attic, The Shining wouldn't occur to me, but between the two...), and the other the death-obsessed chick that McDowell & Wilson were using as a satire of growing-up-too-fast 80s teens, a special case of their earlier drafts being so pathologically invested in the Deetzes as vehicles for social satire they forgot the Maitlands for twenty pages at a time.
The Maitlands are at least factors in the finished film, though the throughline of the movie, if we agree it has one—the Maitlands' stymied wish to complete their nuclear family; Lydia's failed nuclear family; how will this shake out?—gets buried in the mess, so while Ryder is able to more-or-less convey an answer to "why does Lydia want the Maitlands to be her ghost dad and ghost mom?", mostly because her live dad and live mom suck, "why would they want Lydia?" doesn't get a great answer in a movie where, despite Lydia's psychic sensitivity existing almost explicitly to service this plot, they interact with one another for all of about three minutes of not-especially-emotionally-dense screentime and Lydia's choices are missing some big chunks of connective tissue. For his part, Beetlejuice was (eventually) improved in almost every respect (always intended as a comedy, the final film is, y'know, funny), but what is obviously gained in the insistence upon Beetlejuice's dangerousness remains lost in its frankly pretty foggy definition of what that danger is, when it seems like the conflict ought to be "the Maitlands' strict preference for non-lethal scares vs. Beetlejuice's hardcore demon tactics, something something climax." Which of course it is, but it's really unclear to me why the Maitlands' tactic of literally possessing the elder Deetzes, even for the purposes of a woozily-enchanting Harry Belafonte number, and then attacking all their guests with haunted prawns, is supposed to be less scary than Beetlejuice's violent physical conjurings; I think most people would find both these things extremely scary, whereas only meat-puppets in a social satire, as the Deetzes remain, would think to try monetizing either one of these things in, er, some fashion. "In some fashion" is how the Maitlands are explained to have graduated to advanced Pazuzu powers—maybe they finally read that not-very-big book! but then I'm not sure why "intangible spirits still able to physically manipulate objects" required detailed instructions about how to scare people—and, of course, it was originally something Beetlejuice did for them, when the script still had him around swindling the Maitlands and corrupting Lydia. So as a result of that whole unfinessed smoosh I described, we're going to swerve into a final act that is, still, all about sexually enslaving the teen,** without that being too terribly much "set up" before it happens. (And for a movie that plainly hates Delia even more than its actual villain, its film-long campaign of contempt for her concludes with a pretty indifferent shrug.)
None of these things are even close to filmkillers, but they are problems that keep me from loving Beetlejuice as much as I want to. And I do want to: the whirling energy that gets packed into its 92 minutes, and the vitality of Burton's style as it first sprang into the world in its most brazen form, mean I might watch it another half-dozen times before I wind up haunting this house. And, by Beetlejuice rules, nothing appears to be able to stop me from watching it another half-dozen times in the 125 years after that.
Score: 7/10
*Or Beetle Juice. Or, most properly, Betelgeuse. Or "Beetle Geiss," going by Adam's phonics-challenged pronunciation.
**You will not be thoroughly surprised that this movie with Jeffrey Jones offers some uncomfortable moments otherwise, too.
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