There’s a frenzied, intoxicating anticipation of this weekend’s releases Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It sees the return of old stars Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara, along with rising new talent Jenna Ortega. Will another old familiar face come with them? Is it possible for us to finally go back to the Tim Burton of old?
Tim Burton was the first to direct Beetlejuice Back in 1988. Created by Tim Burton Edward Scissorhands In 1990 and Batman Returns In 1992 and 1993 the characters dreamed The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Tim Burton before CGI. Tim Burton before all that half-hearted Disney Remake. Tim Burton started looking and feeling all the same before his movies. Tim Burton was back when he regularly delivered movies that looked like nothing you’d ever seen before. impossible dream Beetlejuice Beetlejuice It may take us back to the wild rise and torrid decline of Hollywood’s most visibly distinctive director.
In part, that’s the main reason Beetlejuice A perfect encapsulation of all the little grace notes that made Burton’s work so exceptional – and all the grace notes Burton began to abandon as his movies became more flashy and self-contained.
What made Burton’s best movies sing was the play between the normal and the paranormal, grounding in reality as the events were decidedly unreal.
I’m not talking here about the stuff Burton made his name on. Burton is best known for his love of the cynical and whimsical, an aesthetic from which he borrowed. Edward Gorey Through the German expressionists. Her characters are perpetually slathered in white pancake makeup and wearing black-and-white striped stockings while a haunting, shimmering Danny Elfman tune drifts away in the background. Often, his movies play with familiar children’s story tropes that go horribly wrong.
He did all this while creating BeetlejuiceAnd he did it later, and he’s still doing it These are characteristics that make Burton films stand out, but they are not used to make Burton films great.
What made Burton’s best movies sing was the drama between the normal and the paranormal, grounding in reality as the events were decidedly unreal. He played that game better than anyone else – and we can see his moves with exceptional clarity in the first Beetlejuice.
1988 Beetlejuice Opens with a deceptively charming tracking shot and a clever visual trick. The camera pans over a panorama of a small New England town: a whitewashed church steeple, a village green, a beautiful Main Street – and then a gigantic spider, crawling across the frame.
When the camera pans back, it reveals that the spider was not that big, but normal in size. It was always the village that was small. What we see is a fiendishly detailed miniature-scale model.
After that, whenever you look at the little town, you can’t help but suspect that what you’re looking at is still a model. Whenever you see the model, you can’t help but think how similar it is to the real thing. The question of what is real and what is just an illusion becomes ambiguous, impossible to resolve. All movie long, Burton tap-dances along the blurred line between the two and thrives there.
In the film, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play Adam and Barbara, a nice, ordinary suburban couple who have the misfortune of unexpectedly becoming ghosts. When the demonically haunted Deetzes (including Catherine O’Hara as the stepmother and a stunningly young Winona Ryder as goth teen Lydia) enter, Adam and Barbara hire the diabolical poltergeist Beetlejuice, played by a demonic Michael Keaton, to banish them from their lives. . old house
All these years later, what we remember most are the two central performances. Keaton, with the nervy flow of his polyvocal patter, made for an iconic Beetlejuice as he tries to evict Dietges from Adam and Barbara’s house. Ryder began her career as the veiled and monocle-wearing Lydia, wistfully saying, “My whole life is one big dark room.”
But part of what gives Beetlejuice and Lydia their spiky charisma is the way they play Adam and Barbara, Keaton and Ryder’s wild card straight men. They are reserved and common sense whereas Keaton and Ryder are exuberant and irrational. They make Keaton and Ryder’s erratic violence readable.
You need them both as your perspective to get a feel for the bonkers Bertonian Land of the Dead, where the kitchen door leads to a monster-infested wasteland.
You only have to have Davis say, “I like that little girl,” like Barbara, to see that Lydia is a sweet and vulnerable teenager hidden beneath the spiky black thong and black dress. You need Baldwin as Adam blusters, “What are your qualifications?” To really feel Keaton’s mercurial aggression in Beetlejuice. You need both as your perspective to get a feel for the bonkers Bertonian Land of the Dead, where the kitchen door leads to a monster-infested wasteland and a green-skinned corpse serves as the receptionist and rolls its eyes when you ask a question.
Barbara and Adam are mundane ghosts. Lydia is a real girl as fantastically gothic as the ghostly Beetlejuice. Which of them represent the real and which the unreal – which of them are model villages and which are the real thing – is a question the movie never bothers to answer. The fun of playing between the two possibilities is the thing.
Burton plays with the same duality in most of his best films. The abused Edward Scissorhands comes to life for us as the regular suburban mom decides to take him home. Sexiest scene between Batman and Catwoman Batman Returns When they’re both disguised in their cover identities as civilians Selena and Bruce, we’re left wondering which identity is real.
Yet Burton began turning away from such games a few years ago. In the plethora of adaptations and remakes he’s produced lately, you’ll see him routinely set his outre gothic monsters against characters who walk right by who bring a more everyday perspective to the film.
In 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (perhaps his first truly horror film), Burton kept the regular kid Charlie undiscovered by his gentle eccentricity as Willy Wonka, played by Johnny Depp. His 2007 adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (a decent enough outing for a mid-career Burton), she chose to depart from the tradition that usually sees the plump and sunny Mrs. Lovett playing the yin to Sweeney Todd’s door yang. Instead, in Burton’s version of the story, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd are two peas in a black-and-white-striped pod. If there’s any tension between the duo, it doesn’t come in their aesthetic or their performance.
Little by little, over the years, Burton’s stories have drifted into a whimsical Gothic fantasy unconnected to any sense of reality, where everything seems equally impossible and so its impossibility never becomes interesting. As his budget grew and CGI became increasingly ubiquitous, his aesthetic took a similar journey as his story.
BeetlejuiceIts monsters are all puppets and practical effects from 1988’s Cutting Edge, a tactile, familiar kitsch that adds to the film’s comfortable spookiness. By 2010 Alice in WonderlandBurton was able to create an entire world in CGI. It created an unsettling effect that his films were populated by actors standing in complete isolation in front of a green screen, struggling to evoke a sense of wonder or terror that remained invisible to them.
Burton’s last feature film was a live-action remake dumbo In 2019. Critics generally felt that the film was the best (It got 46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but some of them also saw a strange kind of metaphor in the picture. The movie, which saw a flamboyant underdog freak’s circus sold out as a joyless sideshow at a gaudy amusement park, felt oddly like an apology for the last 15 years of Burton’s career.
“The drive to make money, when it takes over the drive to make great art or entertainment, kills creativity and destroys humanity and decency, dumbo said,” wrote Alyssa Wilkinson in her review for Vox. “Turning simple joy and wonder into pure eye-popping extravaganzas can only end in emptiness, people losing their jobs and getting caught up in greed.”
Tim Burton seems to know that his work has suffered for some time. Questions suggested by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Whether or not he takes the opportunity to learn from what he used to do really, really well — and whether the Tim Burton of old, like Beetlejuice, will rise from his grave triumphant.
