Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
She had never exactly been a normal teenager but Lydia Deetz’s life changed far beyond the ordinary the year she moved with her father Charles and stepmother Delia to Winter River, to the house on the hill he had only seen in photographs when he purchased it, formerly home to the recently deceased Maitlands, Barbara and Adam, only to find that they still haunted the house and had unwittingly engaged the services of a disreputable, unreliable and unorthodox bio-exorcist named Beetlejuice.
Three and a half decades later, as host of the supernatural investigative television show Ghost House, now in its fifth season, Lydia is still sometimes scared but knows that she has been doing this the whole of her strange and unusual life, communicating and reasoning with the dead, her problems being with the living, her controlling producer/boyfriend Rory and her daughter Astrid who barely speaks to her, until all is overturned by a call from Delia which takes her back to Winter River following the tragic death of her father in a plane crash as he returned from a exotic bird watching expedition.
The film which brought Tim Burton to wide mainstream recognition and opened the door for both he and star Michael Keaton to take on Batman the following year, it was in 1988 that Beetlejuice was released, Burton now reuniting with many of his original cast for the belated afterlife of a sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with Keaton in the title role, Winona Ryder as Lydia and Catherine O’Hara as Delia, joined by Wednesday‘s Jenna Ortega as Astrid, Mulholland Drive’s Justin Theroux as Rory, a new age man so convoluted he has practically inverted himself, Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson of the Afterlife Crime Unit, and Brotherhood of the Wolf’s Monica Belluci as Delores.
The latter the jumping off point for the narrative thread of the spirit world, her digital reassembly sitting poorly with the craftsmanship of the puppetry and modelwork which gave the original charm, she could be excised with little impact other than the loss of an entertaining monochrome flashback interlude which explains how Delores met, married and betrayed Beetlejuice, the bio-exorcist now employed in the bureaucracy which he so despised before, perhaps explaining why he is not only eager to escape but why he is more inclined to be helpful to Lydia when she desperately seeks his help rather than acting as a constant agent of chaos, though of course the small print of the contract bends in his favour.
Running parallel stories with the time split evenly between the realms where before the spirit world only impinged upon the living when the door was opened, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice recreates the style and mood of the original from the typeface of the titles, accompanied of course by Danny Elfman, to even repeating the same jokes, but rather than a recreation it is a catch up with the characters and how they have grown, or failed to, Delia still provoking with her art but Delia stalled, seeing dead people but unable to communicate with her daughter, Ortega as acerbic as her breakout role but warmer and less all-knowing.
The multiple plots of Rory, Delores, Lydia’s late husband Richard, Delia’s late husband Charles and Astrid’s boyfriend Jeremy wrapped up with a convenient brevity as unconvincing as Beetlejuice’s promises of devotion and fidelity, the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar juggles with efficiency rather than flair with every character essentially on the same journey, the film at its best when it steps back and takes a moment to breathe, as when Delia and Lydia reflect on their relationship as unlikable stepmother and difficult daughter, and in the unexpected dance numbers, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a successful resurrection but not one which will likely support further examination of the corpses.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is currently on general release
