[COLUMN] The Charming, Low Stakes Nostalgia of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains some spoilers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, mainly around what it inherits from the original film. If you want to go in blind, feel free to bookmark the piece and come back when you’ve had a chance to see it.

Even for somebody a bit exhausted by the constant stream of legacyquels and franchise brand extensions, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is oddly charming.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is obviously nostalgic. It is a long-gestating sequel to Burton’s second feature-length film, Beetlejuice from 1988. The film reunites Burton with several cast members from the original film, including recurring collaborators Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara. The film finds Lydia Deetz (Ryder), returning to the home her father Charles (Jeffrey Jones) bought in the original film, and reawakening the demonic Betelgeuse (Keaton).

Even beyond the returning cast, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice features countless references to the original film. Once again, the plot is driven by Betelgeuse’s desire to trick Lydia into marrying him, with the movie culminating in a ghoulish wedding. The movie returns to the bureaucratic afterlife from Beetlejuice. The model maintained by Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) is still in the attic. The characters inevitably face stop motion sandworms on Titan.

To be fair, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is beholden to some of the worst impulses of these modern belated sequels. While the original Beetlejuice was a largely irreverent farce with an occasionally mean sense of humor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a strangely sentimental and even melancholic piece of work. While it’s never quite as heavy-handed as the recent Ghostbusters sequels, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tries to add a sense of profundity to match its profanity. It is, very aggressively, a movie about grief.

To be clear, the original Beetlejuice had its own thematic concerns. It was about gentrification and the literal death of taste, but it never felt the need to foreground these ideas as weighty or important. In contrast, to quote Francis Ford Coppola critic Peter Griffin (Seth McFarlane), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice “insists upon itself.” Like so many modern blockbusters, and indeed more recent Burton films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about absent fathers.

Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is still mourning her father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), who disappeared on an expedition in the Amazon that most likely did not involve researching spiders. Despite her claims to be a psychic medium capable of communing with the dead, Lydia cannot see the lost patriarch. However, Richard disappeared years before the events of the film. The Deetz family reunion is motivated by Charles’ death on his return flight from a bird watching expedition.

Jeffrey Jones was one of Burton’s most reliable collaborators, appearing in Beetlejuice, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow. However, their collaboration ended when Jones was arrested for inducing a minor to pose nude. He has subsequently faced charges for failing to update his information as a registered sex offender. So it makes sense to write him out of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The film even cleverly depicts Charles’ death in stop motion animation, which is a clever way to get around Jones’ absence.

However, this cleverness is somewhat offset by the strange decision to turn the absent Charles into the emotional center of the story. While Jones isn’t on screen in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the audience is constantly thinking about him. More than that, Charles’ headless body is a recurring character in the film, which means that the character is part of the story, even without Jones’ involvement. It’s particularly strange because the movie is so insistently earnest in its treatment of Charles.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also suffers from a few other common sequel mistakes. Betelgeuse was a supporting character in the original film, making his first full appearance around the half-way mark and then disappearing until the movie’s climax. Keaton’s performance was genuinely electrifying and the character design is stunning, and it’s a testament to both that Betelgeuse so completely dominates the original film despite his relatively modest screen time. It’s part of the movie’s charm.

However, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice understands that the audience is here for Betelgeuse. So, despite Keaton’s assertion that his character’s screen time has been trimmed down, the script has to invent a way to bring Betelgeuse into the plot a little earlier and more proactively than the first film. So it gives the demon a backstory and creates an antagonist for him, his monstrous bride Delores (Monica Bellucci). The film is heavily front- and back-loaded with Delores, but she’s strangely absent from most of the film’s second act, when Betelgeuse is interacting with Lydia, which makes the movie feel a little unbalanced.

To be clear, these are not fatal problems. They are the kinds of issues that sequels to beloved films inevitably pick up over years, due to the tension between the efficiency and irreverence of the original film and the demands of nostalgia that inform any sequels. As such, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t anywhere near as striking as the original film, but it’s also nowhere near as cynical and empty as many of the comparable legacyquels.

This may be because the movie’s nostalgia feels oddly personal. Over the past decade or so, Burton has become more focused on his past than his future, chasing the high of his frankly incredible 1980s and 1990s run. Corpse Bride was his attempt to co-direct his own stop motion animated adventure, stepping into the shoes Henry Selick had occupied in Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. With Frankenweenie, the director literally remade one of his earliest short films.

However, Burton’s nostalgic impulses are entirely his own. He might no longer be pushing himself to try new things, but his invocation of past glories never feels like it is driven by cynical calculations like box office projections. Tellingly, the past few years have seen Burton reconnecting with actors from earlier in his career, reuniting with old friends: Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Martin Landau in Frankenweenie, and even Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito in Dumbo.

It can be hard to quantify such things, and it is perhaps unfair to even suggest the possibility, but there is a marked difference in Michael Keaton’s performance reprising the role of Betelgeuse in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and his return to the character of Bruce Wayne in The Flash. In The Flash, Keaton seemed entirely disconnected from the eccentric weirdo of his collaborations with Burton, instead spending most of the film quoting familiar lines back to the audience.

In contrast, there’s a palpable energy to Keaton’s performance in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Betelgeuse is a character close to Keaton’s heart; he designed a lot of the character’s appearance himself and by most accounts it was “a largely improvised performance.” Even before signing on for the sequel, Keaton talked about how he “never had so much fun in [his] life” as he did on Beetlejuice. It’s no wonder Keaton skipped the press tour for The Flash to work on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Keaton seems to revel in this reunion with Burton. Indeed, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems to exist primarily as an excuse for Burton’s old friends to hang out; the film even features a cameo from Danny DeVito. It’s also an opportunity for Burton to introduce his tried-and-tested troupe to some of his more recent collaborators. He directed Jenna Ortega on the hit Netflix show Wednesday and he is currently dating Monica Bellucci. It’s all a big family affair, and that bleeds into the film.

In some small way, this injection of novelty helps to keep Beetlejuice Beetlejuice from getting lost in empty references to what came before. Jenna Ortega is a star. While she receives the coveted “and” billing on the film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is smart enough to understand that Ortega is too talented (and too popular) a performer to cast in a role designed to reflect the glory of the older cast members. As such, Astrid is allowed to carve out real space for herself in the film’s narrative.

This willingness to look beyond the original film enriches Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The film introduces the character of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a Hollywood superstar turned afterlife detective. It’s a great character brought to life by a game performance, a joke built around the idea that Tom Cruise will kill himself on screen at some point. (“How was I supposed to know it was a live grenade?”) Betelgeuse’s put-upon assistant and involuntary decoy Bob (Nick Kellington) is a breakout star.

It also helps that the bulk of the nostalgia in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is channeled in the right direction. The film isn’t just an empty collection of memes from the original film. Pointedly, while Beetlejuice Beetlejuice includes a sequence that harks back to the iconic Banana Boat Song scene from Beetlejuice, the movie cannily opts to use another song in another context. This is not a Wikipedia article compiling references to earlier works.

Indeed, the film’s nostalgia is largely rooted in the actual texture and substance of Beetlejuice. While the film obviously includes a lot of computer-generated imagery, Keaton pushed for a lot of practical effects. As a result, the sequel retains a lot of the tactility of the original – the set construction, the make-up, the prosthetics, the production design. It doesn’t look like a slavish digital recreation of the first film, but instead a celebration of what made that film so gorgeous in the first place.

That said, the most appealing thing about the nostalgia of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice might be the endearingly low stakes. Sure, Beetlejuice spawned an animated series and a divisive musical, but it is not a mega franchise. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t have the weight of a shared universe pressing down upon it. The film doesn’t have to set up three sequels, a spin-off and tie-in to a video game. It doesn’t have to stitch together decades of continuity across several reboots. It can just exist.

This is perhaps why the nostalgia of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice works so much better than this year’s other big brand extensions. At its core, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is just nostalgic for a good Tim Burton movie.