BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is a ramshackle effort trading on goodwill and nostalgia. What made the original so disarming and anarchic 36 years ago burbles to the surface from time to time, but as a whole, it is a mawkish thing following formulas that that original eschewed with raucous glee.
We find Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) older (of course) and sadder as the host of a wildly popular ghost hunting show that, along with much else, has put her at odds with her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). On the other hand, she has reached a warm-ish détente with her step-mother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), which is a good thing because as the film starts, it is Delia who breaks the news of how Charles, her husband and Lydia’s father, has met a gruesome demise. Together they go to Astrid’s boarding school to break the news to the melancholic teen, which affords the script the opportunity for exposition to catch us up on the Deetz family, and the putative new addition, Rory (Justin Theroux), Lydia’s conspicuously empathetic manager.
Of course, the tragedy sends them back to the looming Victorian in Winter River, and to the attic where, despite, ahem, grave misgivings, Lydia is forced to call upon the eponymous Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) so save Astrid when her hormones, in the form of Dostoyevsky-reading Jeremy (Arthur Conti), lead her not just astray, but into the afterlife. The timing is oddly synchronous, as Beetlejuice is being stalked by Delores (Monica Bellucci), an old flame from his past who doesn’t so much want to rekindle the flame as extinguish her ex with extreme prejudice, and Lydia may give him a way out.
Delores provides the single best sequence in the film, harkening back to the original with its black humor and impudent wit as she reassembles her disparate body parts with a stapler. Other than that, it’s a waste of Bellucci, who does a great impression of a waxwork, though she does manage a Mario Bava vibe. As for Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, dead action star turned undead police inspector, it’s a one-note joke that not even Dafoe can transmute into a compelling character. Or even a funny one. He’s all goggle eyes and wagging tongue taking a bold commedia dell’arte approach, perhaps as a counterpoint to Keaton’s still delightful aggressively garrulous demon. I’ve missed that character’s spieling and vamping and wish he had found a better film in which to make his return.
Ryder reinvents her morbid adolescent with aplomb, but Ortega comes off merely whiney rather than evoking the refined ennui that Ryder embodied. O’Hara, orange hair and cackling melodrama, is a genius of diversion as an avant-garde artist who is a legend in her own mind, and not forced to wander in the treacly sloughs of sentiment to which they have reduced her character. Theroux fares worse, and seems both confused and tentative in a role that irks without finding anything interesting to say about sycophants. Nor does the film as a whole find anything new to say about the failure of organized religion that Flaubert didn’t cover in Madame Bovary.
There are, naturally, special effects aplenty as Beetlejuice, Dolores, and assorted others wreak havoc in the living and the dead, and they are well-done as they pay homage to the earlier film that achieved them without the CGI that is now so readily available. Puns abound, and the Jeffery Jones problem is neatly side-stepped with animation and a post-live situation that avoids using the actor’s likeness. The single best effect, and maybe performance, is Bob (Nick Kellington), the menial underling in Beetlejuice’s afterlife office. A shrunken head on a normal-sized body, he has a wacky yet poignant emotional resonance that speaks not just to his own particular set of unfortunate circumstances, but the plight of the working class as a whole. And this is as it should be, with an afterlife waystation envisioned as a drab and demoralizing continuation of everything that is wrong with modern society.
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is an echo of faded glory. As to why the fabulously singable Da Oh has been replaced with the dada grotesquerie Richard Harris’ MacArthur Park, I refuse to speculate. Not even a small tsunami of sweet green icing flowing down is visually compelling enough to explain it. Best to move on and hope that if BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE is on the horizon, all concerned will have learned from the mistakes here.
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