31 Nights o' Horror Selections #5: BEETLEJUICE @ 35

Young Adam and Barbara Maitland find themselves rendered as ghosts after a car accident. The world outside the door for them is a weird and hostile environment, somewhere between a moon of Saturn and a Tex Avery cartoon. Before they can quite settle into the new reality a small family of New Yorkers moves into the place, threatening to strip the house into the kind of affected monstrosity that plays better in Manhattan than here in Connecticut. The Maitlands have found a book left for them by unseen forces, a manual the recently deceased. It's wordy and dry and difficult to read but they come across an ad in it for an entity who offers a kind of extermination service to get rid of the new living pests. This manifests on the attic televsion as a home-made late night style commercial. The guy really wants to be seen. Should they?

Tim Burton's second feature came cool on the heels of his debut Pee Wee's Big Adventure from three years previous. While that had been a marginal hit at best it still made an impression for its quirky story, the star's uber quirky performance and Burton's own family friendly bizarreness in design and direction. He was a fit for Beetlejuice but that didn't come up until Burton had rejected a pile of mid-'80s drivel that was going for the John Hughes quirky teen dollar. But Beetlejuice felt bespoke. There was so much opportunity for building a world that teetered on the edge between cartoons and reality that it would have felt irresistable.

And that's how it looks and feels. The house is the sole quirk free element in this conflict between a couple who would vanish in sunlight from blandness if they weren't made interesting by being ghosts and a family of three members constantly at odds with each other. The bickering alone might write itself, just add Burton's trick or treat aesthetic, Danny Elfman's musical gymnastics and you've got an iconic hit.

I first saw this on video just after its release and while I enjoyed the ghost train look and the satirical city vs country caricatures I felt it lacking. The fresh Winona Ryder as the first goth in mainstream cinema and her own big break was pretty captivating and her counterpoint, Catherine O'Hara's Delia, created a perfectly balanced tension. Jeffery Jones was as seemingly effortless in his anxiety as he had been rarely imperial previously in Amadeus. The strangely flavourless Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis cannot quite break out of the flatness of their written parts, even when literally pulling grotesque faces in the afterlife. Glen Shadix as the urbane schemer Otho is magnetic until his function takes over and he is left with mechanics alone.

That leaves Michael Keaton in the title role, a manic, fluid voiced spinning top of a character whose malevolence is barely masked by his charm. While it's not true to say that he is the sole reason for watching the film, he owns each second he is on screen and many while he's off. But when he is off, having been introduced, he is the only thing we want to see. Without him the drag of the second act is laid too bare and is inescapable. By the time of the pre-climactic scene when we should be held by the sight of a terrible supernatural sentence passed on to the Maitlands we just keep looping between an agonisingly slow effects development and a wondrous and unbelievable reception of it by its witnesses. The race to risk the thing that would reverse this feels interminable.

After this, an epilogue scene which should be darkly warm ends up cute. If you like cuteness you'll dig this end. If cuteness makes you as nauseated as does me you might have to look away. I should point out here that this impression is more from my first viewing than my more recent one. More recently, I was easily able to look around Burton's clumsy mishandling of the pace of the climax and the goofy ending recognise a little more of the shifts that had occurred in the household, why the Maitlands were finally made substantial and the joy of the final moments. 

Tim Burton's career from this high and his follow up Edward Scissorhands plateaued for a decade before making a grinding decline in the 2000s. Has his public abandoned the persistence of an old sure thing? Is Burton just another victim of a great shift to day-long comics universe films that deliver their own fantasy without the depth of his humour? Wes Anderson's authorial outings get public guernsies each time but the sense is that it's because he doesn't get more ambitious and plays to an audience that never gets sick of the flavour? Burton's triumphs have always needed writing that he doesn't appear capable of providing himself and his look and feel no longer cut it outside of imitators keeping to the limits of music videos. If he were to return it might need more Big Eyes or Ed Wood style departures but that would mean less Tim Burton. Watching Beetlejuice almost make it across the line into durability was a difficult watch for such an easy toned film and it just made me wonder if those few exceptions that revealed his skills without the goofy art direction were only glimpses into where he would go if he wanted to hide. Otherwise we could just put this on again and sing along. It is quite catchy.