March 30, 1988| Three years ago, director Tim Burton startled audiences with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, a brightly-painted swirl of cartoonish lunacy. But now it’s clear that bizarre comedy was a mere warm-up exercise. Burton’s latest opus, Beetlejuice, is so exuberantly batty, so outrageously zany, it makes Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure seem as somber as Ironweed.
Indeed, there has never has been another movie quite like Beetlejuice. Try to imagine what might have happened if Salvador Dali and Walt Disney had collaborated on Poltergeist, and you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect. But even then, you won’t be fully prepared for the surreal supernaturalism that Burton has in store.
Things begin quietly enough in the Connecticut town of Winter River, where Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) are enjoying a brief vacation in their charmingly traditional New England home. Barbara is selecting new wallpaper, Adam is puttering in the attic with his miniature model of Winter River. Their cassette player fills the rooms with the bouncy calypso beat of Harry Belafonte standards. Life is good.
But then Adam and Barbara drive their car off a bridge, and all hell breaks loose.
At first, death is more of a troublesome inconvenience than anything else for the Maitlands. True, they cannot venture outside their home, which they’re haunting, without dropping into a distant world where giant sandworms lurk. (Shades of Dune, no less!) But things are bearable, albeit confusing, until their house is sold.
Beetlejuice poses what heretofore may not have been considered a particularly burning question: What do you do when new residents move into the home you’re haunting, and they want to redecorate? Pity the poor Maitlands: The people who purchase their house are trendy Manhattanites. Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) wants an old-fashioned retreat from big-city pressures, but Delia (Catherine O’Hara), his artist wife, has different ideas.
With the aid of a chi-chi interior decorator, Otho (Glenn Shadix), Delia sets about turning the Maitland homestead into a showcase for grotesque sculptures (her own creations) and hideous furniture. All things considered, even hell couldn’t be so ugly.
Trouble is, the Maitlands cannot move. And they don’t get much help from their “afterlife caseworker,” Juno (Sylvia Sidney), who presides in a bureaucratic nightmare of rotting corpses, lost souls and understaffed inefficiency. The Maitlands want to scare the Deetzes, but they’re too nice to be truly frightening. When they attempt to be genuine spooks, they undercut the effect by wearing designer sheets.
Eventually, the Maitlands seek outside help. Enter Betelgeuse, more commonly known as Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a wacky wraith whose non-stop, hard-sell patter is not unlike that of a used-car salesman. Beetlejuice bills himself as a “free-lance bio-exorcist,” capable of ridding homes of pesky humans. He’ll gladly scare away the Deetzes — for a price.
All of which makes Beetlejuice sounds linear and logical. Trust me: It isn’t. Sure, it plays according to the rules established very early by scriptwriters Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren. But the first rule is, there are no rules.
This is a movie where dinner guests plucked from the pages of Vanity Fair are demonically possessed, and forced to sing calypso tunes. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen guest star Dick Cavett mouth the words to “Day-O.”) It’s a movie where the determinedly hip Delia Deetz will growl, not gasp, when she sees a ghost. “You’ve got to take the upper hand in situations,” she explains to her gloomy stepdaughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder). “Or people, whether they’re dead or alive, will walk all over you.”
Tim Burton once worked as an animator for Walt Disney Productions — The Fox and the Hound is among his credits — and the experience obviously honed his cartoonish sense of visual design. At times, Beetlejuice appears to be equal parts Claymation, animation and inexplicable prestidigitation, with bits and pieces of live action thrown in for good measure. Beetlejuice becomes a living merry-go-round, the Maitlands yank and shape their faces like Silly Putty, a doomed housefly screeches “Help me! Help me!” as it’s dragged into the Winter River miniature model. And the snobbish Otho gets his — he’s forced to wear a powder-blue leisure suit.
Cinematographer Thomas Ackerman, production designer Bo Welch and costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers must be counted among the stars of Beetlejuice. But the on-camera talents play equally important roles.
Michael Keaton is marvelous, playing the title character as a hyperkinetic huckster who looks like Bozo the Clown gone punk. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis bring a refreshing sweetness to their roles, providing amusing contrast to Catherine O’Hara’s fearsomely chic Delia Deetz. Jeffrey Jones, Glenn Shadix and Sylvia Sidney are well cast. And Winona Ryder is perfect as Lydia, who, for a long time, is the only human able to see the ghostly Maitlands. “Most live people,” Lydia explains, “ignore the strange and unusual. But I myself am strange and unusual.”
And so is Beetlejuice.
