Movie Review: Beetlejuice (1988)

Beetlejuice (1988) directed by Tim Burton

Recently deceased couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) discover that they can't move on from their home in rural Connecticut. They continue their quiet lives at home until disrupted by the Dietz family, some New Yorkers with a lot more "fashionable" attitudes and aesthetics. They plan to make over the house. They also have a daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) who is Goth to the extreme. Adam and Barbara are not happy about the new family and decide to scare away the newcomers. That doesn't work because Lydia isn't afraid and her parents, with their friend Otho (Glenn Shadix) decide to exploit their "haunted house" for fun and profit. In desperation, Adam and Barbara ask for help from their afterlife caseworker who does not provide much help, other than warning them off of Beetlejuice, a "bio-exorcist" who advertises that he can get rid of the living. While Adam and Barbara are very average small-town Americans, Beetlejuice is an over-the-top wild man who will stop at nothing (almost literally nothing) to get the job done. They invoke him and then have to deal with the consequences.

The movie is very imaginative and madcap. Adam and Barbara start the movie having what's now called a "staycation" where he works on his model of the town in the attic and she lives the life of domestic tranquility. They die in a car accident but are mostly content to continue their staycation. The new family has completely different ideas of what the good life is, focused on money and art. Lydia's father Charles (Jeffery Jones) wants to live a quiet country life (it's all but said that he had a nervous breakdown as a real estate mogul) but his artistic wife Delia (Catherine O'Hare) wants to ply her artistic trade on the house. So she and Adam share an artistic side. And Charles and Barbara share the desire for a quiet home life. This simple, subtle tension gets buried under the depiction of the afterlife, something Lydia is deeply interested in, though the dead people (even Beetlejuice) warn her off from dying. The afterlife is very odd, with vast deserts filled with sandworms, the bureaucratic civil service with odd customers and odder employees, and a handbook for the recently deceased that is perfectly visible and readable for the living (though not easy to understand). The narrative is chaotic, full of fantastic ideas strung together in a barely coherent order. But the ride is a lot of fun and very creative, making it hard to resist, at least for me. This movie is Tim Burton being Tim Burton, not Tim Burton delivering a movie for someone else (like Batman or Alice in Wonderland). 

Recommended, highly for Tim Burton fans--this is the crazy stuff we love.