“Beetlejuice” is a whimsical farce directed by Tim Burton that explores the afterlife with irreverent humor. The film begins with a serene New England setting that swiftly morphs into a miniature town, revealing its main characters, Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), as a loving, childless couple who meet their end in a car accident. As ghosts, they struggle to scare away the new, more macabre occupants of their home—a New York family led by the eccentric Delia (Catherine O’Hara). To resolve their haunting issues, they enlist the help of the mischievous and grotesque Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), whose chaotic presence injects the film with wild energy. Burton’s direction revels in surreal, cartoonish shocks and zany visual gags, with Keaton’s manic performance being a standout. While the film’s chaotic and inventive humor, coupled with its inventive visual style, makes it a comedic classic, its finale is somewhat subdued and disjointed, lacking the vibrant momentum of its earlier scenes.
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BOO!
by Pauline Kael
Beetlejuice is a farce about what happens to us after death: it’s a bugaboo farce. At the start, the camera seems to be flying over an idyllic New England town, but the town changes into a miniature town on a table, and Adam (Alec Baldwin), the hobbyist who has carved it, takes a spider off a little rooftop. Adam and his wife, Barbara (Geena Davis), are a devoted, though regretfully childless, young couple who have been happy in their cozy old barnlike house—an eccentric pile of angles and peaks—while fending off realtors who want to sell it for them. The two drive into town on an errand, passing through a picture-postcard covered wooden bridge, but on the way back, as they go through the bridge, Barbara swerves to avoid hitting a dog, and the director, Tim Burton, reveals his first great gag: the car hangs over the edge of the quaint red bridge, kept from plunging into the river by the weight of the dog on a loose plank. When the dog gets bored and trots off, the car falls.
The next we see of Adam and Barbara, they’re ghosts—tame, sweet, home-loving ghosts, not very different from how they were in life. The movie doesn’t really get going until a New York family (who are far more ghoulish) buy the house and start redecorating, turning it into a high-tech space to show off the slinky wife’s huge works of sculpture (which are like petrified insects). Miffed, Adam and Barbara want to scare these intruders away, but they’re too mild to do the job themselves, so they call upon the services of the rutty little demon Betelgeuse, pronounced Beetlejuice, who is played by Michael Keaton, and who rises from the graveyard in the tabletop town. The movie had perked up when the New Yorkers arrived, because Delia the sculptor, the madwoman who’s the new lady of the house, is played by the smudge-faced blond Catherine O’Hara, late of SCTV, and the possessor of the freakiest blue-eyed stare since early Gene Wilder. (She has sexy evil eyes.) Delia is too macabre and uppity to be fazed by ordinary apparitions. Even the decaying Beetle- juice himself—he might be a carnival attraction: This way to the exhumed hipster!—barely distracts her. But Keaton is like an exploding head. He isn’t onscreen nearly enough—when he is, he shoots the film sky-high.
This is not the kind of spook show that gives you shivers; it gives you outré shocks. Adam and Barbara are like the juvenile and the ingenue singing their duets in the M-G-M Marx Brothers pictures while we wait for lewd, foxy Groucho to grab the girls’ bottoms. Michael Keaton is the Groucho here, but fast and furious, like Robin Williams when he’s speeding, or Bill Murray having a conniption fit. And maybe because of the slow start and the teasing visual design—the whole movie seems to take place in a hand-painted nowhere, with the “real” town and the toy town miscegenating—Keaton creates a lust for more hot licks. He appears here with a fringe of filthy hair, greenish rotting teeth—snaggled—and an ensemble of mucky rags. And he keeps varying in size (like the star Betelgeuse). When he’s let loose and the transformations start, along with the gravity-defying stunts, I wanted more and more of them. I wanted the overstimulation of prepubescent play—a child’s debauch. And that’s what Tim Burton, who began in the animation department at Disney, and directed his first movie in 1985 (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure), offers. He’s still in his twenties, and he has a kid’s delight in the homegrown surreal. The plot is just a formality. To enjoy the movie, you may have to be prepared to jump back into a jack-in-the-box universe. But it may work even better if it takes you unawares and you start laughing at a visually sophisticated form of the rabid-redneck kids’ humor you haven’t thought about in years—the kind of humor that features wormy skeletons and shrunken heads. Here the shrunken heads are still attached to fullsized bodies.
The end is subdued. The final scenes have a plot logic that you can’t really fault, but logic isn’t what you want, and you feel as if the comedy blitz is suddenly over without your having fully grasped that it was ending. The last part isn’t very well directed, and neither are the scenes where O’Hara’s Delia decides that having a haunted house will bring her some social cachet. Burton may not have found his storytelling skills yet, or his structure, either, but then he may never find them. This movie is something to see, even if it’s a blossoming chaos and the jokes sometimes leave you behind. (When Burton picked Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett for small roles, he probably wanted them to make fun of their images, but they don’t appear to know how, and the writers—Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, and Warren Skaaren—haven’t steered them.) Still, the best of W. C. Fields was often half gummed up, and that doesn’t seem to matter fifty-five years later. With crazy comedy, you settle for the spurts of inspiration, and Beetlejuice has them. When Delia and her New York art-world guests are at the dinner table and, possessed, suddenly rise to sing the calypso banana-boat song “Day-O,” it’s a mighty moment—a haymaker. And you can’t tell why. (If you could, it wouldn’t be funny.) The satire of a waiting room in the social-services bureaucracy of the afterlife (which is staffed by suicides) is like great early animation. It features a spectral effect linking cigarettes and death so creepily that the audience sucks in its breath and laughs: when a raspy-voiced social worker, played by Sylvia Sidney, lights up, she exhales smoke through her nose, her mouth, and her slit throat.
The movie, with its toy town, is like Red Grooms’ cities: it’s an art work that has no depth but jangles with energy. Tim Burton takes stabs into the irrational, the incongruous, the plain nutty. And though a lot of his moves don’t connect, enough of them do to make this spotty, dissonant movie a comedy classic. The story is bland—it involves the parental love that Adam and Barbara develop for the sculptor’s stepdaughter (Winona Ryder)—but its blandness is edged with near-genius. Michael Keaton has never been so uninhibited a comic; his physical assurance really is demonic. He’s a case of the beezie-weezies.
The New Yorker, April 18, 1988
