BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE ★★★½
(M) 104 minutes
Death in the work of Tim Burton tends to be a joyous occasion, at least for the filmmaker. As a rule, it’s less an end than a beginning – a chance for Burton to keep experimenting with ways the human body can be mutilated, dismantled or otherwise transformed.
Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) reunite in Tim Burton’s long-delayed sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
That goes double for the bureaucratic afterlife revisited in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-delayed sequel to Burton’s beloved horror-comedy Beetlejuice (his second feature, released way back in 1988). This is a very physical vision of the next world, the denizens of which resemble corpses in varying stages of decay. If you die getting chomped in half by a shark or burnt to a cinder, you stay chomped or burnt, at least until it’s time for you to climb on the Soul Train and embark on your final destination in the Great Beyond.
The childlike literalness of all this allows Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), the clownish ghoul who serves as master of ceremonies, to communicate mainly in gruesome visual puns. If he gives you his heart, he’s going to rip it right out of his chest. And if he spills his guts … well, I don’t have to draw you a picture, although Burton undoubtedly would be glad to.
From the Beetlejuice films alone, it wouldn’t be difficult to guess that Burton started out as an animator. As a mainstream Hollywood director since the 1980s, he’s been faced with an ongoing challenge: how far is it possible to bring the same kind of weightless absurdity to live-action feature filmmaking while telling a story that makes a degree of sense?
Catherine O’Hara as Delia, Jenna Ortega as Astrid, Winona Ryder as Lydia and Justin Theroux as Rory in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
For good or ill, there’s a lot of plot in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, scripted by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the showrunners of Burton’s TV hit Wednesday. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the Goth teen heroine of the first film, has parlayed her gift of second sight into an outwardly thriving career as a TV medium, to the disgust of her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).
Also come up in the world is Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), once a pretentious sculptor, now a pretentious multimedia artist in the Marina Abramović mould. Jeffrey Jones doesn’t return as Lydia’s bird-watcher father, but his character’s demise supplies an excuse for all three generations of Deetz women to reunite at the creaky hilltop family home where it all began.