Tim Burton’s 1988 “Beetlejuice” recalls the director’s glory days

There’s a crazy, intoxicating hope in this weekend’s release. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Old stars Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara return, along with rising new talent Jenna Ortega. Will another familiar face be there? Is it possible we’ll finally see the old Tim Burton again?

The Tim Burton who directed the first film Beetlejuice in 1988. The Tim Burton, the Edward Scissorhands in 1990 and Batman Returns in 1992 and invented the characters of 1993 Nightmare Before Christmas – The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Tim Burton before CGI. Tim Burton before all those half-hearted Disney remakes. Tim Burton before his films all looked and felt the same. Tim Burton back when he regularly delivered films that didn’t look quite like anything you’d ever seen before. The impossible dream of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it can take us back to the time before the stormy rise and meandering decline of one of Hollywood’s most visually striking directors.

This is partly because the original Beetlejuice is a perfect summary of all the little touches that made Burton’s work so extraordinary – and all the touches that Burton gradually abandoned as his films became more cheesy and self-indulgent.

I’m not talking about the stuff Burton built his name on. Burton is best known for his love of the macabre and the bizarre, the aesthetic he took from Edward Gorey via the German Expressionists. His characters are always made up in white pancake makeup and wear black-and-white striped stockings while an eerie, twinkling Danny Elfman tune plays in the background. Often, his films play on the tropes of well-known children’s stories gone gruesomely wrong.

He did all this while Beetlejuiceand he did it afterward and he still does it now. These are the things that make Burton films distinctive, but they are not what made Burton films great in the past.

What distinguished Burton’s best films was the play between the normal and the paranormal, the anchoring in the real when events became decidedly unreal. He played this game better than anyone else – and we can see his movements with extraordinary clarity in the first Beetlejuice.

The year 1988 Beetlejuice begins with a deceptively charming tracking shot and a clever visual trick. The camera pans across the panorama of an idyllic small town in New England: a whitewashed church tower, a village green, an idyllic main street – and then a monstrously large spider crawling through the frame.

When the camera pulls back, it becomes clear that the spider wasn’t that big at all, but was normal size. The village has always been tiny. What we’ve been looking at is a devilishly detailed miniature model.

When you see the small town afterwards, you can’t help but suspect that it is still a model. When you see the model, you can always be reminded of how much it resembles the real thing. The question of what is real and what is just pretend becomes blurred and can no longer be answered. Throughout the film, Burton dances on the blurred border between the two and thrives there.

In the film, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play Adam and Barbara, a nice, normal suburban couple who have the misfortune of unexpectedly becoming ghosts. When the monstrously urban Deetzes move in (including Catherine O’Hara as the stepmother and a startlingly young Winona Ryder as goth teen Lydia), Adam and Barbara enlist the devilish poltergeist Beetlejuice, played by a diabolical Michael Keaton, to drive the living out of their old home.

After all these years, we remember the two main performances above all else. Keaton, with his nervous stream of multi-voiced quips, was an iconic Beetlejuice as he tries to evict the Deetzes from Adam and Barbara’s house. Ryder launched her career with her role as the veiled, monocle-wearing Lydia, who darkly intones, “My whole life is one big, dark room.”

But part of what gives Beetlejuice and Lydia their prickly charisma is the way they play off of Adam and Barbara, who are the serious men in contrast to Keaton and Ryder’s jokers. They are reserved and reasonable, while Keaton and Ryder are exuberant and irrational. They make the untamed wildness of Keaton and Ryder readable.

You need Davis as Barbara, saying, “I like that little girl,” to see that Lydia is a sweet and vulnerable teenager hidden beneath the spiky black bangs and black dresses. You need Baldwin as Adam, blustering at Beetlejuice, “What are your qualifications?” to really feel Keaton’s erratic aggressiveness. You need both of their points of view to get a sense of the crazy Burtonian deadland, where the kitchen door leads to a monster-infested desert and a green-skinned corpse acts as receptionist and rolls its eyes when you ask a question.

Barbara and Adam are ordinary ghosts. Lydia is a real girl who is just as fantastically gothic as the ghostly Beetlejuice. The question of which of them represents the real and which the unreal – who is the model village and who is the real – is never answered in the film. The play between the two possibilities is what makes it fun.

Burton plays with a similar duality in most of his best films. The tormented Edward Scissorhands is brought to life for us because the normal suburban mother decides to take him home. The sexiest scenes between Batman and Catwoman in Batman Returns come when they are both disguised in their cover identities as civilians Selena and Bruce, which makes us wonder which identity is real.

But Burton began turning his back on such plays years ago. In the numerous adaptations and remakes he has made recently, you can see how he regularly misses the opportunity to pit his outlandish gothic monsters against characters who could bring a more everyday perspective to the film.

In 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (perhaps his first truly terrible film), Burton left the normal boy Charlie unexplored to focus on the mannered eccentricities of his Willy Wonka, played by Johnny Depp. In his 2007 adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (a fairly passable performance for Burton in mid-career), he decided to deviate from the tradition that usually sees the rude and cheerful Mrs. Lovett as the yin to Sweeney Todd’s dour yang. Instead, in Burton’s version of the story, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd are like two peas in a black-and-white striped pod. If there is any tension between the two, it is not reflected in their aesthetics or their performances.

Little by little, year after year, Burton’s stories seem to drift into a whimsical gothic fantasy, detached from any sense of reality, where everything seems equally impossible and therefore the impossibility never becomes interesting. As his budgets have gotten bigger and bigger and CGI has become more ubiquitous, his aesthetic has followed the same journey as his stories.

BeetlejuiceThe monsters of are all puppets and special effects from the cutting edge of 1988 technology, with a tangible, familiar kitsch that adds to the cozy creepiness of the film. In the 2010s Alice in WonderlandBurton was able to create entire worlds in CGI, creating the unsettling effect of his films being populated by actors standing in complete isolation in front of green screens, struggling to convey a sense of wonder or terror at wonders that remained invisible to them.

Burton’s last feature film was the live-action remake of Dumbo in 2019. Critics generally found the film to be solid at best (it has a 46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but some of them also saw the film as a kind of bizarre allegory. The film, in which a circus of scrappy misfits sells itself out and becomes a cheerless sideshow at a fancy amusement park, felt oddly like an apology for the last 15 years of Burton’s career.

“When the urge to amass money overwhelms the urge to create great art or entertainment, it kills creativity and crowds out humanity and decency. Dumbo says,” Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review for Vox. “Turning simple joy and wonder into pure, dazzling spectacle can only end in emptiness, people losing their jobs and trapped in greed.”

Tim Burton seems to know that his work has been suffering for some time. The question of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is whether he has taken the opportunity to learn from what he used to do really, really well – and whether the old Tim Burton, like Beetlejuice, will rise triumphantly from his grave again.