To say that I’m protective over the first Beetlejuice film is probably an understatement. There’s a devoted compartment nestled in the back of a certain kind of ‘weird kid’ brain for many Tim Burton films that’s hard to qualify in that way. Many of us are goth or queer or monster-fuckers of one variety or another (or some combination?), and because Burton’s oeuvre made a home for us, we’re inclined to look askance at the needless over-commodification of that space. Beetlejuice in particular is testament to how ecstatically odd art can get when you allow a group of highly talented people to just mess around until you find… it. How could anything in this age of cash-grab-rehash measure up to that?
So when the lights dimmed, the film started, and the faintest strains of Donna Summer’s cover of “MacArthur Park” started playing, you can imagine the sudden relief that swept my body. It was as though every muscle I hadn’t noticed I was holding began to unclench.
Oh. We still wanna be fucking strange, I see? Okay. Let’s go.
While it’s near-impossible to replicate the cavalcade of happenstance that made the first film so good, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels like a story told by people who wanted to spend time with its characters and world, who appreciated those things rather than simply caring about the audience’s memory of them. It doesn’t always succeed on that front, but the many pitfalls that were possible—over-slickification of the CGI variety, constant tired callbacks to the first film, reliance on Michael Keaton’s (admittedly flawless) shtick—don’t get the chance to rear their heads. It never feels as though some overzealous suit stuck their hand in to tweak the formula, but rather trusted that everyone on board knew what they were doing, and again, allowed them to play.
In point of fact, this is a story about Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and the two of them finding their way back to one another in the wake of estrangement. It’s perhaps a cliché that Lydia has a rocky relationship with the kid, but there’s nothing clichéd about the execution: Astrid doesn’t actually believe that her mother sees ghosts, in part because her father (Santiago Cabrera) is dead and Lydia has never been able to produce him for her. The fact that seeing ghosts doesn’t exactly work like that isn’t going to matter to a grieving teenager, and Lydia has no idea how to make this right between them—particularly while she’s in the midst of a career as a television medium on a show produced by her insufferable boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux).
Things haven’t worked out well for Lydia as an adult: Seeing ghosts turned stressful in her day-to-day; she was divorced well before her ex died; her father has just turned up dead as well; oh, and she’s seeing Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) everywhere. Stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, here to remind us all that Moira Rose had an even more delightfully unhinged predecessor) is handling Charles’s death with all the calm and serenity that we would naturally expect—meaning she’s devoted herself to primal screaming photography and artistic treatises on grief, and demanding that everyone participate in these rituals with her.
The Deetz women are financially stable, certainly—and I could go on a lengthy side diatribe about how one of the greatest choices this film makes is showing Delia as a commercially successful artist because that is correct—but they are struggling at the moment. Cue a wildly inappropriate marriage proposal from the aforementioned insufferable boyfriend and Astrid’s flirtation with a boy in town (Arthur Conti) to complicate the plot.
It is correct that Betelgeuse’s role in all this is on the periphery; Keaton himself insisted that character not be overused because he can so easily slip into the realm of too-much-of-a-good-thing. But he spends most of the film being chased down by two parties: actor-turned-afterlife-cop Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) and the bio-exorcist’s ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci). While Wolf brings serious TJ Hooker energy to the film—a thing so delightful to write that I’m sad I’ve never before had the opportunity—Delores’s part in this tale is decidedly Vibes Only. How well this works for a given viewer will be down to personal preference and enjoyment of Burton’s aesthetics. She is certainly of a type for the director (the instances where Burton has turned his partners into undead stitched-together women now numbers at three), but this time the character is given leave to be a figure of menace rather than the wan ingenue. For my part, though she has absolutely no bearing on the outcome of the story, I enjoyed her so very much.
There are moments on the periphery of the film that allude to pieces we’re missing, and thankfully never turn into bevies of exposition. We don’t know precisely what happened to the Maitlands—the starring ghosts of the first feature who were helping to raise Lydia by the end of the movie. We don’t know exactly what ended Lydia’s marriage to Astrid’s dad. We also don’t know how Lydia managed to arrive at her horrible ghost-hunters-via-Elvira network TV hell existence, or even what manner of fame she’s achieved. It’s an aspect to filmmaking that is grossly misunderstood and ill-used these days, knowing what bits of information are essential and what should be left out and to the audience’s imagination, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits that balance over and over with an enviable ease.
What’s also impressive is the pacing of the film, in that it has a sense of pacing at all. We live in an era of high-octane-action-all-the-time for pretty much everything other than dramas, and it’s easy for forget that movies can go slow and be great? This sequel’s build runs counterintuitive to the current framework, with the majority of the plot consisting of characters… having conversations. The afterlife shenanigans are sprinkled throughout to bring in all the incredible design work and the stop-start feel of the original, but the pressing action takes ages to unfold, making it all the more engaging when the stakes finally charge up.
Do things get a little overindulgent at times? Yeah, of course. There are couple places where it feels as though bits take place because “this is a Beetlejuice movie.” The ending will be divisive, for sure. (For my part, it felt like the perfect send-up of bad sequel finales, if an odd choice.) There are sequences that go overlong for the sake of a joke. There are also, more importantly, places where cultures wind up feeling like set dressing, which is a problem Burton has never cared to fix in his films. Those flaws might diminish the film’s enjoyment factor for some, and that’s entirely fair.
The places where the film lives up to its name are the ones where it remembers to be a story about one wacky little family and their dead people problems. Lydia and Delia’s relationship has grown and shifted over the years, and while they’ll never see eye-to-eye, there’s a palpable bond between the two that feels lived-in and strangely comfortable. Astrid may be frustrated with her mother, but that frustration means that she misses all the ways that they’re alike—two sunken-eyed misfits with macabre souls, confident that no one could possibly understand them.
With Lydia Deetz now a middle-aged woman—another long side diatribe I want to give about the importance of giving us this, of showing her to us, and allowing her to be her morose neurotic beautiful self—there’s a wonderful reflection taking place. We get to experience that familial drama from several vantage points this time around, and the result feels like a work of translation, the chance to see something with fresh eyes. Lydia gets to be both mother and child in this story—embarrassing her kid and misunderstanding her, but still and always worrying Delia, who may never have been a maternal type, but loves her all the same.
With all of this bubbling beneath the surface, Betelgeuse bursts out from under the floorboards to wreak his usual havoc. His help is needed once again, and his obsession with Lydia is creepy as ever (a fact that the film happily never tries to smooth over). The afterlife is still rendered with practical effects and makeup, still a labyrinth of paperwork and effluvia and acidic color. There isn’t much more that I could ask for, personally.
Another movie isn’t really needed—and, thankfully, isn’t aggressively seeded either. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice instead hangs in the air like an eerie mist, daring us to imagine a world where you make a sequel… only because you really wanted to make one.
