Tim Burton's films are
populated by outsiders and non-conformists with their own unique vision of life
that sets them apart from mainstream society. It is this affinity for the
disaffected that is perhaps the most personal aspect of his work. The success
of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
paved the way for Burton's next feature, Beetlejuice
(1988), his calling card – a breakout film that led to his getting the job to
direct Batman (1989). It is also one
of the purest examples of his distinctive sensibilities – a skewed sense of the
world as seen through the eyes of someone who is an outsider.
Barbara (Geena Davis) and
Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) are a happily married couple living in a small
town when they are killed in a car accident on the way home from running an
errand. In a darkly whimsical touch, their demise hinges on a small dog perched
precariously on a plank of wood that sends them off a bridge to a watery demise.
The Maitlands come home with no recollection of how they got back. It slowly
dawns on them that they’ve died. Maybe it’s the presence of a book entitled, Handbook for the Recently Deceased (“It
reads like stereo instructions,” Adam laments) or maybe it’s when he steps out
of the house and finds himself in a nightmarish realm populated by a gigantic
sandworm.
At first, Barbara and Adam
think they’re in some kind of heaven – getting to spend eternity in a home they
love, but their idyllic existence is shattered when the Deetzes arrive and move
in. Delia (Catherine O’Hara) fancies herself an artist (“This is my art and it
is dangerous!” is a priceless bit she says in describing her work), but is
actually quite awful. Her husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones) is a crass former
real estate developer. Lydia (Winona Ryder) is their daughter, a brooding girl
decked out all in black and who lives by the credo, “My life is a dark room.
One big dark room.” Only she can see the Maitlands (“I myself am strange and
unusual.”) and becomes sympathetic to their plight.
Thrown into the mix is Otho
(Glenn Shadix), a trendy hipster interior decorator (“So few clients are able
to read my mind. They just aren’t open to the experience.”) that helps Delia
transform the Maitland house into a Yuppie nightmare. Barbara and Adam want to
get rid of the Deetzes and seek help from the afterlife. First, they go to a
kind of Department of Motor Vehicles from the beyond and are assigned a
caseworker by the name of Juno (Sylvia Sidney) who gives them some advice.
The waiting room on the way
to meet Juno is an amusing tableau of grotesques, from a woman cut in half to a
man with a shrunken head to a man with a shark still attached to his leg. It is
all of these little touches that bring the afterlife scenes vividly to life and
are so memorable, like the sickly yellow and green lighting scheme that
portrays it as some kind of bureaucratic hell, or when Juno has a cigarette and
the smoke exits the slit around her neck.
When her advice doesn’t get
rid of the Deetzes, but instead encourages them to stay (in a memorable scene
where the Maitlands force the Deetzes and their friends from the city to lip-synch
and dance around to “The Banana Boat Song” by Harry Belafonte), they enlist the
help of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), a self-professed "bio-exorcist"
who helps the recently deceased from being "plagued by the living,” and
acts like a perverted used car salesman. Not surprisingly, he has his own
agenda, which soon puts him at odds with the Maitlands, culminating in a wonderfully
surreal battle royale between the good ghosts and the bad mortals with Betelgeuse
ping-ponging back and forth like a bee on acid.
Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis
are well cast as the nice but rather bland Maitlands. All they want is to be
left in peace and see the Deetzes as an affront to everything they value. The
Maitlands represent wholesome, small-town America and much of the humor in the
film comes from the culture clash between them and the insensitive big city
Deetzes. 1988 was a good year for Baldwin who showed versatility in several
films, including Married to the Mob, Working Girl and Talk Radio, but playing such a “normal” guy in Beetlejuice was quite a departure from these other roles. Likewise,
it was a strong year for Davis who also appeared in Earth Girls Are Easy and The
Accidental Tourist, which featured the actress playing very different
roles. Their easy-going charm and how comfortably the play off each other made
Baldwin and Davis a believable couple.
Michael Keaton’s Betelgeuse
is the comedic equivalent of a whirling dervish – a force of nature as he makes
the maximum impact with his limited screen-time. Betelgeuse is a venal
degenerate willing to say or do anything to get what he wants. Keaton embodies
him with just the right amount of manic energy. The scene where Betelgeuse
meets the Maitlands for the first time and lists his “qualifications” is a
marvel of comic timing and tempo as the actor bounces off of Baldwin and Davis’
intimidated couple. Keaton conveys a zany energy that recalls his feature film
debut, Night Shift (1982), only
cranked up another notch. Beetlejuice
was the culmination of a string of comedies for Keaton and served as a fitting
conclusion to an impressive run of films (although, he did star in 1989’s The Dream Team) and so it’s not
surprising that he went all out with this role. He would go on to play Batman
in Burton’s two contributions to the franchise and then tried his hand at more
serious fare.
Beetlejuice
was a breakout film for a young Winona Ryder whose Lydia was a poster child for
young goths everywhere. She does a nice job playing a death-obsessed girl who
isn’t overly fond of her parents and finds herself increasingly drawn to the
Maitlands. Ryder’s performance goes beyond the superficial trappings of her
character to reveal a deeply unhappy person. The most obvious character who
represents Burton's loner motif would seem to be Betelgeuse with his outrageous
appearance and worldview that threatens to dominate the whole film, but it is
Lydia who is also the most autobiographical character in Burton's film. Lydia's
all-black attire and dreary credo, "my life is a dark room," mirrors
the filmmaker's own fashion sense and personal assessment of himself. Therefore
it seems only natural that Lydia is the actual emotional center of this film,
not Betelgeuse, with the true conflict being the resolution of her morbid
fixations, while the larger battle of life vs. death rages on around her. The
success of Beetlejuice would lead to
her signature role in the pitch black comedy Heathers (1988).
Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey
Jones play vain, self-absorbed Yuppies that are the complete antithesis to the
Maitlands. O’Hara, in particular, is excellent as the sometimes shrill wannabe
artist who feels the need to impose her taste on others. She plays well off of
Glenn Shadix’s pretentious interior decorator as evident in the scene where
they go through the house, picking out color schemes for various rooms. Coming
out towards the end of the 1980s, Beetlejuice
can be seen as a cheeky critique of Yuppie materialism as embodied by the egotistical
Deetzes who see the quaint small-town as an opportunity for them to exploit it
for commercial gain. They are set-up as the film’s antagonists and we can’t
wait to see them their comeuppance at the hands of Betelgeuse.
After Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Tim Burton was offered screenplays with
the word “adventure” in it and found that they lacked originality. “I had read
a lot of scripts that were the classic Hollywood ‘cookie-cutter’ bad comedy. It
was really depressing.” He finally started work on a script for Batman, but it was put on hold by the
studio until the director proved his box office appeal. Eventually, record
industry mogul turned movie producer David Geffen gave him the script for Beetlejuice, written by Michael McDowell. For Burton, McDowell’s script had a “good, perverse sense of humor
and darkness … It had the kind of abstract imagery that I like.”
Burton worked on the script
with McDowell and producer Larry Wilson for a long time until they felt that a
fresh perspective was needed. Script doctor Warren Skaaren was brought in to
provide some logic. Burton ended up casting several actors with a knack for
improvisation, which was incorporated into the shooting script. For example,
when Michael Keaton was cast as Betelgeuse, Burton would go over to his house
and they would come up with jokes, creating the character through lengthy
discussions.
Burton originally wanted to
cast Sammy Davis Jr. as Betelgeuse, but fortunately the producers rejected that
notion. It was Geffen who suggested Keaton, but Burton hadn’t seen him in
anything because he preferred to meet with the actor in person. When they met,
Burton began to see Keaton as Betelgeuse. For the look of the character the
director wanted him to resemble someone that had “crawled out from under a
rock, which is why he’s got mould and moss on his face.”
Geffen had overspent on
their remake of Little Shop of Horrors
(1986) and so they allocated only $13 million for Beetlejuice’s budget with $1 million designated for its extensive
special effects. To this end, artist Alan Munro was hired and worked closely with
Burton storyboarding the film in the spring of 1986. They quickly found a
common affinity for movies that came up with creative ways to create SFX
cheaply. This translated to effects that were “more personal … What people will
see are effects that are, in a sense, a step backward. They’re crude and funky and also very personal.”
Burton and Munro decided
early on to avoid costly post-production opticals in favor of performing the
effects live on set. Munro was brought back two months after completing the
storyboards to oversee the visual effects when the producers realized it was
going to be a bigger job that originally anticipated. To help out Munro, Burton
brought in frequent collaborator effects consultant Rick Heinrichs. He and
Munro spent the first few weeks of production filming tests to show the crew
that they could create effects via “cheap, stupid, easy methods.” The crew
wasn’t convinced and Munro remembers, “There weren’t a lot of believers when we
were actually working on the film.” Heinrichs remembers that they ran into
problems creating the effects live and this made for “one of the most
exhausting and frustrating experiences I’ve ever been through.”
Beetlejuice received mixed reviews
from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “But
the story, which seemed so original, turns into a sitcom fueled by lots of
special effects and weird sets and props, and the inspiration is gone.” In her
review for The New York Times, Janet
Maslin wrote, “Mr. Burton, who seems to take his inspiration from toy stores
and rock videos in equal measure, tries anything and everything for effect, and
only occasionally manages something marginally funny.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley called it a “stylish screwball blend
of Capraesque fantasy, Marx Brothers anarchy and horror parody … Not since Ghostbusters have the spirits been so
uplifting.” In his review for the Los
Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, “There’s a distinctive feel to Beetlejuice, a deliberate Brecht-Weill
jerkiness that allows satire and just plain silliness to play off each other
most successfully.”
Beetlejuice
has the polished, yet personal, handmade feel of Burton’s previous film
complete with old school effects that included stop-motion animation, matte
paintings and practical makeup effects, which have helped the film age well
over the years. Like his other films, Beetlejuice
is interested in outsiders, people like Lydia and Betelgeuse that don’t fit in
or taking people like the Deetzes, who are at home in a big city like New York,
and making them fish out of water in small-town Connecticut. The Maitlands are
also taken out of their comfort zone of a living existence and thrust into the
strange world of the afterlife.
Beetlejuice serves
up many of the clichés of life after death and the supernatural and proceeds to
gently poke fun of them in an entertaining way with a showstopping performance
by Keaton at the heart of it. It remains one of Burton’s signature films and
one of the best examples of how he managed to marry an idiosyncratic style with
commercial appeal. Beetlejuice’s
success would lead to a short-lived cartoon and occasional talk of a sequel
that has gained some traction in recent years.
SOURCES
Salisbury, Mark. Burton on Burton. Faber & Faber.
1995.
Shapiro, Marc. “Explaining Beetlejuice.” Starlog. May 1988.
White, Taylor L. “Making of
Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and His
Other Bizarre Gems.” Cinefantastique. November 1989.
