Review: Beetlejuice (1988)

Beetlejuice

Rating

Director

Tim Burton

Screenplay

Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, Warren Skaaren

Length

1h 32m

Starring

Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O’Hara, Winona Ryder, Sylvia Sidney, Roubert Goulet, Dick Cavett, Glenn Shadix, Annie McEnroe, Maree Cheatham, Tony Cox, Susan Kellermann, Adelle Lutz, Jack Angel

MPAA Rating

Review

With the rare exception, little in cinema history prepared audiences for the sheer lunacy that was Beetlejuice, a film that clicked with them at just the right moment, becoming a wild success in the process.

Director Tim Burton’s mind is a very unusual place and it’s filled with some fantastic and inventive premises. Beetlejuice was his earliest project built on a massive scale. Hot off the success of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton brought audiences into his imagination where he envisioned an old three-story house on a hill in a sleepy New England town where nothing unusual seems to happen until the accidental death of the Maitlands, Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis). They travel to the afterlife where they meet a wide array of dead folks, all of whom have died in unusual circumstances.

The Maitlands find themselves trapped as ghosts in their former home as it’s sold off to the Deetz family, an avant-garde bunch led by Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara with Winona Ryder as their teenage daughter Lydia. Michael Keaton plays the titular Betelgeuse (pronounced like the title but spelled like the star), a denizen of the afterlife that sells himself to the Maitlands as a bio-exorcist. Despite warnings from his former mentor Juno (Sylvia Sidney), they agree to engage his services, which culminates in a hilarious dinner table sequence that stands out as the best of the film’s many terrific gags.

Apart from Jones, Keaton, and Sidney, much of the cast were recently emerged into the public consciousness and spring-boarded from this film into greater things. Davis would go on to win an Oscar and Baldwin and Ryder would pick up nominations. Keaton was already a star, so anchoring this film only solidified his position as a prominent box office figure, cemented the following year in Burton’s Batman. He would also later earn an Oscar nomination for a role modeled off his post-Batman years. Sidney was a star of the silver screen and her performance is a perfect one as can easily be said of the rest of the cast. Even guest stars Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett provided brilliant support.

Much of what would become the Burton aesthetic came to prominence with this film. The dark, gothic foundation bolstered by bright, vibrant colors with strange yet relatable figures populating it. This was a style that had some roots in David Lynch (The Elephant Man) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil) but which managed to fuse with the mainstream just enough to become desired commodities well into the 1990s. Burton became far too dependent on his style eventually, but for a time, he was riding high thanks to his successes here and with Pee-wee.

The production design draws inspiration from early horror films, especially German expressionist films like Nosferatu while adding in references and taking notes from B-movies of the 1960s. To give this brazen and inventive design style added punctuation, Burton brought in “Dead Man’s Party” songwriter, Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman, who would become a consistent force behind Burton’s films. This film marked one of his best contributions of music those collaborations.

Beetlejuice is an experience that has to be felt to be understood. Having seen it in theaters originally, and many times on TV after, that feeling manages persists, it’s a film that can sometimes feel quite dated. Even then, there’s still a lot of fun to be had.