Review: "Beetlejuice" and the power of the Controlling Idea

Movie of the Week #7 is about the difference between 'good' and 'great'

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. Follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

In my review of Tim Burton’s Batman from this time last month, I summarized my complicated thoughts on the film thusly:

[Burton’s Batman is] a sometimes great and always fascinating cinematic object that is overwhelming as a piece of craftsmanship, and impossible for me not to respect as a genuine attempt to make a real movie instead of manage a brand or extend a property. I enjoy it less as a beginning-to-end linear experience that fully holds together than as a big audiovisual playground that is entrancing to explore – to poke around at not just the iconography and cinematography and Elfman’s amazing music, but also the performances and careful command of tone. 

With this week’s release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the delightfully-titled sequel to the 1988 film Burton made just before Batman, I knew I wanted to revisit the cinematic origin of Michael Keaton’s ‘ghost with the most.’ I had no dearth of notes to work from after watching, but it took me quite a while to figure out what I wanted to say about Beetlejuice, and whether or not it was worth devoting a piece to at all, because the main thrust of my reaction is basically identical to what I wrote about Batman: It’s a spectacularly-made toy box of extraordinary visuals, filled with memorable performances and moments, that evokes so much mood and atmosphere, but that doesn’t really hold together as a story, or as a single front-to-back 90-minute experience. The film is brimming with life and vitality, there are fun characters and inspired moments of staging everywhere, but it’s just a bit too misshapen to ever be more than the sum of its parts. There is a reason all future interpretations of this movie – like the 90s cartoon series, or the recent, wonderful Broadway musical – are better on their own terms, as they get to play in the amazing sandbox Burton and company built, while sharpening the story, characters, and tone into something more cohesive. The same, of course, is true of Burton’s Batman, which spawned the superior Animated Series, a show that could not exist without Burton’s aesthetic and atmospheric breakthroughs, but is much clearer and more confident in how it approaches Batman and tells stories in his world.

And if that was all I really had to say about Beetlejuice, supported by a laundry list of the many things I like and the places where the film fails to tie it all together, I didn’t think it would be a piece worth writing. Recycling the same thesis for two different films in quick succession wouldn’t be satisfying for me to write or you to read. But there was one piece of dialogue in Beetlejuice that kept gnawing at me, that I kept thinking about as the skeleton key unlocking the movie’s potential and explaining why its punches don’t fully land. And the more I considered it, the more I realized how exploring the reasons that line feels so significant is not only a good reason to write about Beetlejuice, but might make for a solid little Film Studies lesson, too.