At the Venice Film Festival, which it just attended as the opening film out of competition, it was really highly anticipated. Now, from September 5, it will be in theaters.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s latest work, is a sequel to the film released in 1988 (Beetlejuice) that established him as a creative genius.
The original starred Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, joined by Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis and Catherine O’Hara, to tell a typically “burtonesque” story somewhere between gothic and comedy. To sum it up: two husband and wife who are victims of an accident become ghosts (they are Baldwin and Davis) and end up sharing their home with an insufferable New York snob couple (alive) and their “goth” daughter, Lydia (Ryder). To get rid of them, they summon the demon Betelgeuse — the name is pronounced like “beetlejuice,” literally meaning “cockroach juice,” Keaton plays him — a mischievous spirit who is an expert at scaring the living, but in the process they discover that the girl sees them and can help them. Thus, after a whole series of absurd “esoteric” situations-legendary the scene in which Lydia’s parents and their friends are “possessed” and forced to dance Banana Boat (Day-O)-they end up living together peacefully, while the Betelgeuse spirit remains trapped in the afterlife.
The new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a sequel in fact, puts the old characters back together by combining them with a new story: now an adult Lydia returns to the old house with her teenage daughter, but the latter inadvertently opens a channel to bring Betelgeuse back.
So in the film we find Ryder again and also Catherine O’Hara who played her stepmother, and of course star Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse. With them, new living and dead characters: Jenna Ortega – already starring in Wednesday, the Addams Family spin-off directed by Burton – is Lydia’s daughter, Monica Bellucci Betelgeuse’s ex-wife who after reassembling her own corpse haunts him, Willem Dafoe a deceased crime actor turned real cop in the afterlife, and there are still Justin Theroux and Danny De Vito in a cameo.
At Venice Burton said he never understood why the first Beetlejuice had been such a huge success: “Working on this sequel for me was a very personal thing: I had been a little disappointed in the film industry over the last few years, I had lost myself, and I realized that if I wanted to do something new it had to come from the heart. In that sense, making the film was energizing: I need to ‘worship’ what I do, to do it well, and I also really loved working with this cast.”
It must be said, however, that criticism of the sequel has not been enthusiastic, especially regarding the plot, which was judged to be a bit botched and too dense with characters that it fails to flesh out. Although it is undeniable that Burton’s genius was able to bring us back to his original poetics, packing a very “tactile” and almost “vintage” film in which there are very few special effects.
The article Beetlejuice Beetlejuice debuts in theaters Sept. 5 comes from TheNewyorker.
