Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an anarchic culmination of Tim Burton's late period

Tim Burton has made fewer sequels than the other big-budget, brand-name cinematic fantasists of his era: fewer than Steven Spielberg, fewer than Peter Jackson, fewer than James Cameron. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton’s first feature in more than five years, is only his second-ever follow-up after Batman Returns, which he took as a blank-check opportunity to recreate his smashingly successful version of Batman as something closer to his own outsider image. (In other words, as honorable and creatively successful a sequel as has ever been made.) Yet in broad, contemporary surveys of Burton’s career, he’s treated like someone who’s made 20 years or so of nothing but copy-of-a-copy sequels—a man whose once-fertile imagination has been locked in an IP-stuffed, faux-retro, tinned-goth junk drawer.

In a perverse way, this characterization makes sense: Burton has been recycling, reappropriating, and restitching intellectual property for much of his big-screen career. Yes, the first Beetlejuice was a truly original screenplay, and several more of his classics like Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas originate from his own drawings and ideas (though he didn’t actually direct Nightmare himself). Mostly, though, Burton has served as a distinct interpreter of pop-culture touchstones and obscurities alike: Batman comics, folktales, cult artists, a Sondheim musical, Pee-Wee Herman. Even after a decade-plus of IP overload in Hollywood, he’s still one of the only directors to ever make a film based on bubblegum cards. 

That film, Mars Attacks!, had the honor of becoming the first of many fall-off lines on Tim Burton’s endlessly drawn and redrawn career graph. Mars was the end of his ‘90s hot streak—until it was reclaimed and Sleepy Hollow turned out to be (by most accounts) finely crafted spooky-season entertainment, at which point it became easy enough to call Burton’s decline a 21st century problem, drawing the sharp downward slope at his misbegotten Planet Of The Apes re-do. Then again, the subsequent Big Fish and Sweeney Todd were more than lively enough for some, and Corpse Bride was gorgeous to look at; perhaps the point of no return was a decade later, with Alice In Wonderland, despite it being one of his biggest hits? Or is it easier, after all, to circle back to the ‘90s and reinstitute time of undeath—of zombie Burton—at the intentional chintziness of Mars Attacks!, when the balance between heartfelt meaning and pop-cult junk collecting goes forever out of whack?

Regardless of the reasons for this attention to timeline—perhaps the time-warped quality of a filmography that references ‘20s German Expressionism, ‘40s monster movies, and ‘60s kitsch, all while signifying a mall-goth corner of the ‘90s in the eyes of many nostalgics—it became important to a lot of people to say that Burton hadn’t made a good movie since some particular point of no return, perhaps more than actually watching or analyzing the movies in question. Of course, when you’ve directed original screenplays that became Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, an adaptation of a second-tier YA property like Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children will seem disappointing by comparison, even if—or maybe because—it’s in keeping with your other work.

On the other hand, those early movies may now represent others’ nostalgia far more than Burton’s, and like a lot of filmmakers, his engagement hasn’t demonstrably diminished in recent years so much as it’s been redirected. So let’s briefly examine what Late Period Burton has been up to, taking both the more generous view and the more allegedly damning movies by limiting the concept of lateness to 2010 and beyond. I won’t suggest that all seven of the features he’s directed over the past 14 years interlock like puzzle pieces, with a unity of craft and purpose that rivals his best films from the earlier years. As noted in my Together Again essay about his work with Eva Green, this work sometimes feels divided between a more provocative adult vantage, and an uninspired attempt to affect a more youthful, innocent point of view that he can no longer access as easily. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does feel like it both culminates and, yes, revitalizes a particular period in Burton’s career. Just maybe not in the boilerplate, back-to-practical-effects terms that have been described so far.

The simple read on Later Burton would be to position it as a creative slump bookended his two Disney adaptations: Alice In Wonderland, a 3D blockbuster that normies must have liked (a billion dollars doesn’t come easy in 2010 without some popular support) but cinephiles have increasingly regarded as some kind of demonic entity; and Dumbo, a sort-of-live-action version of the animated classic that got relatively lost in the shuffle of the other Disney remakes that Alice helped create (namely the theme-parky simulacra of Aladdin and The Lion King, which made Alice-level cash while Dumbo languished by comparison). Burton’s interviews about feeling burnt out by the experience of making Dumbo for Disney seem like perfect fodder for that sowing/reaping meme, positioning Burton as the author of his own franchised pain, and plenty of ours, too.

Yet it’s deceptively easy to forget how different Burton’s Alice is from the Disney remakes that followed it. Most importantly, it’s technically not a remake at all, finding an older but still youthful Alice pining to escape the real world (and an arranged marriage) and return to “Underland,” as its residents call it when she does take the plunge. It’s a legacy sequel to a movie that never quite existed; these characters aren’t one-to-one with the Disney cartoon (itself a deeply imperfect attempt to adapt Lewis Carroll), looking rather like a hybrid of Carroll and a Disney storybook of the 1951 movie has been left out in the rain, creating the movie’s bizarre aesthetic of overcast, damp-newspaper psychedelia. The story itself, as many have complained, is subsumed into a generic fantasy quest. (It’s also, as many willfully ignore, foremost a children’s film.) But the feel of Alice In Wonderland is dreamlike, albeit not with the free-flowing strangeness like Burton’s animated movies nor with the controlled lucidity of something like Inception (released the same year!). It more closely approximates an attempt to remember a mostly-forgotten series of nursery rhymes (or favorite childhood movies), mixing up the material itself with who you were when you first encountered it. If Burton’s earlier forays into mid-century junk culture have a perfectly distilled clarity, Alice tries to reach back further, through a foggier looking glass. That doesn’t make it a great movie on its own, but it does make it an interesting one, especially in the context of a Burton filmography rife with distortions of childhood memories. 

By the time Burton returns to Disney for Dumbo—having stopped off to lavishly recreate his old short Frankenweenie in stop-motion animation in 2012—he seems more directly disillusioned with ways that art, performance, and beauty can be co-opted and corrupted. Subsequent to the discovery of flying elephant Dumbo—the climax of the original 64-minute film, refashioned as the midpoint of the remake—the circus run by Danny DeVito’s ringmaster and that employs all of the movie’s heroes is absorbed by an amusement-park impresario (Michael Keaton) who eventually fires all of the circus employees and retains only their marquee attraction, Dumbo himself. It is worth emphasizing that Dumbo was released nine days after the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney was completed. 

Burton hasn’t specified the precise compromises he had to make during the Dumbo process, though they were apparently enough that he has no particular intention of ever returning to his on-and-off studio (who also produced Nightmare, Ed Wood, Alice, and Frankenweenie, following his unhappy stint as an animator at the company in the early 1980s). His supposedly final Disney film is nonetheless full of lyrical sad-circus imagery and engaging performances from members of his own circus-y rep company, punctuated with satisfying bites at the hand that feeds. If Burton was wrestling with the difficulty of making art or even just old-fashioned entertainment with his vision intact, he won the match, regardless of how wearying it was for him. In this respect, Dumbo pairs particularly well with Big Eyes, his largely overlooked 2014 drama starring Amy Adams as artist Margaret Keane and Christoph Waltz as her husband Walter, who initially took credit for her famous paintings of large-eyed children in the 1960s. 

Big Eyes shares screenwriters with Ed Wood, and if anything, it’s even more agnostic about the art that its central, real-life character actually produces. Margaret’s paintings, which have come to be viewed in some corners with ironic appreciation, aren’t regarded with particular awe or derision by Burton. He lets the utter sincerity of Amy Adams make the major implications: Whatever you think of this art, it expresses this person’s particular interests and sensibilities, and that’s worth the fight she eventually puts up. As with Ed Wood’s lovingly, incompetently made B-pictures, the ownership of that self-expression becomes more important than the final product. Without resorting to sanctimony, Burton treats the ambitions of the grasping, smarmy, charismatic Walter as somewhere between monstrousness and madness—including a shadowy scene where he drunkenly intimidates Margaret and her daughter, throwing lit matches at them, eventually starting a full-blown fire. There are traces of mordant humor in the sequence’s canted-angle style, and the movie continues to depict Walter with a certain amused fascination, as when the big courtroom showdown features his eager, delusion prompting for the declaration of a mistrial. But on the whole, Burton doesn’t look at Walter’s monstrousness with the same love as some of his other monster characters, even villainous ones. With his tiny torches and destruction based on his pathetic fears, Walter is more like a one-man mob going after Frankenstein and his creation. That dynamic exists in earlier Burton movies like Edward Scissorhands, of course, using monster-movie framework to satirize suburban conformity, and he ribs the pretensions of image-obsessed artists, too. But in his later films, Burton seems especially taken with the idea that would-be artists and self-styled entertainers can be just as venal, just as lacking in purity, as the everyday conformists. They’re Betelgeuse without the scuzzy charisma of an obvious bad guy.

Ironic, then, that this same period of Burton’s career has been dismissed by would-be purists as lazy, soulless, barely there—more akin to the credit-stealing personality Walter Keane than the obvious kinship he shares with Margaret. If it’s unlikely that the man himself would agree with his detractors, maybe he at least feared the Disney-aided descent they described; in 40 years of making feature films, Burton has never taken a break like the five-year gap between Dumbo and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Even his relative downtime caught some flak, with plenty of former fans rolling their eyes over the lightweight Hot Topic self-imitation he performed by shepherding the Netflix series Wednesday and directing the first few episodes, despite the obvious fact that Burton was neither creator nor showrunner on this project. 

Given its ignominious lead-up, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice should be an admission of defeat. Burton returns to his long-time home Warner Bros. not with a brand-new original project to shake off his Disney blues, but to finally capitulate to sequelizing one of his best-loved classics. Yet while it’s overly simplistic and dismissive to call this the most alive Burton has been in years, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does feel like a mish-mashed reclamation of his singular art—while continuing to reflect on themes and approaches that have become more prominent in his last decade-plus.

Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of Burton’s most purely fun later-period movies, pleasantly scrambled like the loopy Dark Shadows and bustling with ghoulish sight-gag activity and visual references like his stop-motion cartoons. (The first movie is surely inventive and often digressive; it’s also a model of narrative tidiness by comparison.) Thematically, the new movie is trickier to parse—it’s got a lot going on, with much of that hustle and bustle engineered for fun rather than chin-stroking pontification—but it does continue to pull at the thread of ambivalence toward the world he now inhabits. 

Burton questions the intersecting avenues of art, entertainment, and commerce more than ever: Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) remains an artist in thrall of herself, turning even the act of grieving into a gallery of broad gestures, draping her former home in an ostentatious mourning veil. Now-grown Lydia (Winona Ryder), for her part, provides for her resentful daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) by turning her ability to see ghosts into a cheesy paranormal-investigation reality-chat show. Down in the underworld, Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) is hunted by a ghost cop (Willem Dafoe) who doesn’t have any actual law-enforcement experience; he’s a dead B-movie actor called Wolf Jackson, complete with a catchphrase urging people to “keep it real.” Burton renders these caricatures affectionately—the Dafoe character has almost no reason to be in the movie at all except that he’s funny and Burton clearly gets a kick out of him—but for a movie made by a guy who has clearly recycled plenty of childhood obsessions and moods into his adult work, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems profoundly unconvinced by the healing properties of art. Its characters barely seem to know how to go about making art in the first place: Delia, who has seen the most success in using her experiences this way, isn’t quite a Walter Keane-level huckster, but she doesn’t have the purity of Margaret Keane or Dumbo’s circus folk, and the movie never reveals some secret artistic passion behind Lydia’s TV show. 

Moreover, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a legacy sequel with a surprisingly complicated relationship with the past, beyond a simple untying of the previous movie’s bow. Much of the movie’s heavy traffic has to do with characters lingering in their pasts, whether traumatic, mistake-laden, or glorious: Lydia experienced continued hauntings; Betelgeuse trying once again to marry Lydia, while also evading his resurrected and vengeful wife (how was this not called Bride Of Beetlejuice?); Lydia’s parents resisting, rather than accepting, some particularly gruesome fates; a villain stuck poignantly but also selfishly in his own adolescence; Wolf Jackson, treating his job as an extended film shoot. 

Burton gets dinged for recycling the same sad-eyed goth-outsider style, but most of the characters in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, right down to a gaggle of shrunken-head office workers, seem eager to embrace some kind of status quo, with greater concerns than teenage-coded loneliness. The genuine alienation is reserved for Lydia and Astrid, and unlike Margaret Keane, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, or the circus folk, they don’t have any particular art or craft to ameliorate those feelings. (Astrid pointedly puts her faith in science and activism.) Rather than turning his outsider’s perspective into shtick, Burton seems less willing to romanticize it than ever. What’s left is Lydia’s Spielbergian need to reconnect with her child and the world as a whole.

This familiar driving force might be dispiriting, if not for the obvious simultaneous glee Burton takes in sorting through his old box of practical-effects toys and playing with them again, accessing the joy that his characters here are largely denied. Though cultural homages still abound, from expected (Mario Bava) to less so (Soul Train?!), some of the material treats Beetlejuice itself as a part of its junk-culture fodder. Consider the marauding sight of a Baby Betelgeuse, like a nightmare version of Muppet Babies crossed with Child’s Play, more horrific than the original movie’s actual Saturday morning spinoff. In other words, it’s a cheerfully gruesome mockery of the reverence often shown by legacy sequels.

That sense of id at play separates Beetlejuice Beetlejuice from other recent Burton movies—and liberates it, to some degree, from the tedious “he’s back/he’s cooked” discourse binary. Big Eyes, Dumbo, and even Alice In Wonderland are arguably greater, riskier departures from Burton’s own status quo than this one, and they clearly help to inform the direction of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which is, yes, more flat-out fun than anything he’s made in a long time. But fun doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s hard to picture that 15 years’ worth of movies in this more cartoony, anarchic style would have been especially appreciated. The culture around Tim Burton has changed, and some of his older fans seem not to have much of an idea of what they want from him: Nothing that feels like a schticky rehash of his signature moves, but nothing that departs from those moves in the “wrong” direction. By marrying its anarchy to a different form of Burtonian melancholy, more attendant to the disappointments of grown-up life than dark-fairy-tale beauty, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice might be insisting on a relationship mismatch as incoherent as Lydia and Betelgeuse’s long-threatened nuptials. It’s also indulging in the jagged, often strange contradictions that allow Burton to remain such a singular mainstream artist. More than ever, it feels like his job to rummage through items in the pop-cultural junk drawer without neatly sorting them—making it increasingly difficult to designate which are weighty icons, and which are nothing but a pack of cards.