There’s a lot going on in Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 hit Beetle juice. Burton and his writers are bringing back some of the original characters for Beetlejuice Beetlejuiceand introduce a bunch of new ones, and then cram them all into half a dozen derivative, incomplete storylines. None of the characters, new or old, are given any room to breathe or assert themselves in a way that would resonate the way the original film did.
Monica Bellucci, as the film’s supposed villain, gets little more than an introduction and a send-off. Michael Keaton, in his return as the undead, lustful chaos-monkey Betelgeuse, gets a few brief set pieces but almost feels like a background character in his own film. Yet the sequel’s most tragic casualty is poor, lost Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the first film’s goth teen heroine, the sequel’s supposed central figure, and the biggest wasted opportunity in the whole messy deal.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is frustratingly short on new ideas. There are a few promising threads, like Lydia’s mutually frustrating estrangement from her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and Astrid’s soulful connection with a local boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who seems blissfully normal compared to Astrid’s various oddball relatives and their hangers-on. (Not surprisingly, he’s up to no good: Never trust anyone in a Tim Burton movie whose entire brand is “I’m the normal one.”)
None of these half-developed storylines lead to anything, however, despite all the references to the original film, which range from recycled designs and “let’s do the exact same thing again” visual gags to complete copying of the original film. Beetle juice‘s ending for the new film. And that annoying lack of creativity, innovation, or repetition in the sequel is at its worst when it comes to Lydia.
In the 1988 film, Lydia is a classic Burton oddball, an outsider who doesn’t fit into the mainstream and doesn’t necessarily want to. She’s also an angsty teenager. But she changes a lot over the course of the film, finding confidence and joy in life and seemingly making peace with the world. So it’s odd to see her revert to that angsty, teenage version of her character in the new film. Thirty years later, she has a partner, a child and a career, but she feels like the Lydia from the first film’s opening act, cut out of that story and dropped into this one. Ryder plays her with the same steady, tense exasperation she did in 1988, plus a little more angst — but the real problem is the script, which gives her next to nothing to work with.
When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice begins, Lydia is a popular TV psychic who stars in a ghost-hunting series that makes money off of her not-always-welcome ability to see and talk to the dead. She’s still traumatized by her teenage encounter with Betelgeuse and experiences frequent flashbacks and nightmares. Her teenage daughter Astrid hates her, for reasons that seem like someone crossed a few different scripts: Astrid doesn’t believe ghosts are real and seems to think her mother is making up supernatural encounters for attention and money. But she’s Also angry at Lydia for not finding and communicating with the spirit of Astrid’s father, who disappeared into the Amazon and may not even have been dead yet.
The clearest indication of how half-heartedly this film deals with the human element is that there’s barely a hint of who Lydia actually is as an adult, or why she does what she does. Her character is erratically and inconsistently written: in the course of just a few minutes early in the film, she treats ghosts as a terrifying challenge, a dull, everyday inconvenience, and a lifelong trauma. Astrid suggests that Lydia neglected and abandoned her in order to pursue a TV career, but it’s never made clear whether that’s true, how Lydia feels about the accusation, or whether she even has any thoughts about her show and her fame as a ghost hunter.
There might be a way to reconcile all these reactions if Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Small town, Wednesday) gave the audience even a tiny glimpse into how Lydia feels about her career. Is her show a scam, or does she genuinely care about the plight of the ghosts she confronts or the haunted house owners she comforts? Is she cynically exploiting the afterlife for profit, or is she being exploited by her manager Rory (Justin Theroux)? Is she trying to save people from the things she went through as a teenager? Is she a crusader, a savior, a victim, or just someone cashing in on a fad and marketing her talent? We don’t know, because Burton can’t spare 30 seconds to get Lydia to say anything that doesn’t immediately respond to the comedic silliness going on around her.
The first Beetle juice has Lydia as a bored, frustrated teen who is as alienated from her mother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), as Lydia’s Astrid is in the new film. By the time Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceLydia and Delia seem to be on good terms, even able to support and listen to each other. A version of this story that was actually interested in developing either of these characters would have much to offer in Delia’s insights into dealing with a frustrated, rebellious teenager, or Lydia’s memories of what it felt like to be that teenager.
Any of those things would give either of these women something to talk about, either with each other or with Astrid — and enough reason to at least acknowledge the connection as they run and adventure through the underworld. If nothing else, there would be some pathos in the way Lydia’s inability to connect with Astrid mirrors her own struggles with Delia — if that were ever acknowledged, if any of these characters were treated like people instead of props in a series of hyper-jokes.
And again, it’s not like that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice should have been a Tracy Letts playwith characters who respond to a crisis by loudly pouring out all their generational traumas. But watch any truly memorable, emotionally effective comedy from the last 20 years, and you’re likely to find that the writers have done the work to turn the characters into people rather than caricatures, to give them ways to relate to each other and connect, or at least show some real emotion. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice wastes every chance of that. And it should have started with someone deciding at some point who the main character of this movie actually is, whether she’s ever made a meaningful choice in her life, and whether the last 30 years have had any effect on her at all.