Thoughts on Beetlejuice

 

via Tenor

*Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) stops dusting her attic to sit on a drop cloth-covered couch, causing more dust to fly up. Husband Adam (Alec Baldwin) contemplates the new addition to his model of their hometown, a depiction of his and Barbara's funeral.*
"Cabin fever, hon?"
"Well, I can't clean anything properly. The vacuum's out in the garage and we can't leave the house. Why don't they tell us something? Where are all the other dead people in the world? Why is it just you and me?"
"(looks up) Maybe this is Heaven."
"In Heaven there wouldn't be dust on everything."

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1. It really is a nice fucking model.

2. Adam's almost instantly established as a good guy, opting to pick up a spider that climbed on the replica of his and Barbara's home and ... throw it out the attic window? I guess it would spin a web for safety.

3. Barbara totally miscarried, right? She and Adam could have just been unable to conceive, but between Jane (Annie McEnroe) sorta realizing how heartless she sounded after saying the Maitlands' home would be better suited for a family and Adam suggesting that he and Barbara try again during their staycation, I get the impression Barbara was pregnant at some point.

4. "... he got hair right down this goddamn shoulders. He says to me, 'Just, just trim it a little.' I took the scissors to him so fast ..." I wonder how much time was covered in Bill the barber's reminisce. For all we know, his whole life was described in just a few seconds.

5. Well, they sure don't make covered bridges to be as sturdy as staircases. I had to pause the movie and watch it in slow motion to get an idea what Adam and Barbara's bumper sticker said. It wasn't "Baby on Board," like I thought, but "I Brake For Animals."

6. I'm going to assume initial screenwriter Michael McDowell was responsible for the scene when the Maitlands gradually discover that they're dead. Tim Burton did an excellent job of building the tension, from the confusion over how the Maitlands even got home to Adam's experience "outside" to the reveal of the Handbook for the Recently Diseased, excuse me, Deceased.

7. "Ooh-la-la, what do we got here? 'The Maitlands,' huh? *chuckles* Cute couple. Look nice and stupid, too. *laughs*"

8. Betelgeuse has his faults, but Jane is the movie's true villain. Not only did she entice a prospective buyer when Adam and Barbara had no interest in selling their home, but she apparently completed the sale (notice there's no "pending" on the sign) by the time of the Maitlands' funeral. Then again, Charles (Jeffrey Jones) was a motivated buyer, Jane's apparently the next of kin, and there probably wasn't much of an estate to settle. Still, bitch moved fast.

9. Whose cows are those outside Adam and Barbara's? The house seems out of the way, but apparently they do have neighbors, since people later rubberneck during the renovations.

10. LET US REJOICE! Catherine O'Hara has shown up! "Delia Deetz, welcome home ..." I'm counting on all of you readers to share your favorite Delia lines/delivery/business, and I'll try not to hog them all. "*looks around* A little gasoline ... blowtorch ... no problem."

11. Time for a star entrance! Look at Lydia (Winona Ryder). She's taking everything in, and at the same time, so are we.

12. "Ten minutes. I'm already perfectly at ease." You have to wonder just how thorough was Charles' mental collapse back in New York. Then I remember that I don't want to think about anything dark related to Jeffrey Jones ...

13. I picked a good week to watch Beetlejuice, as it was announced that the musical adaptation is returning to Broadway. I'm not going to fill my review with "On stage, it happened like this" notes and will stick to the most notable changes or quirks. For example, Otho (played on screen by Glenn Shadix) didn't appear until Act Two. 

14. One of the things I love about Otho in the movie is that we're not sure if he's bullshitting Delia or if he does believe that the first guest shouldn't enter through a door, that he was a hair analyst ("Briefly.") and that he had a stint with the Living Theatre.

15. "Charles, I will not stop living and breathing art just because you need to relax. ... I'm here with you. I will live with you in this hellhole, but I must express myself. If you don't let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will GO INSANE AND I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME!" It's the unblinking stare right after that sells the outburst.

16. Adam's a briefs man, of that I'm sure.

17. Twenty minutes in, and most of the conflict is established. Adam and Barbara are adjusting to their still-recent deaths and the tacky people (well, one tacky woman, a whipped man and a reserved teenage girl) living in the home that they cannot leave, because if they do, they'll get eaten by sandworms. The Maitlands are also ready to be taken advantage of by a sleazy ghoul. And now that I write that, I suppose Delia's situation is not that different from Barbara's. She moved into a tacky house, cannot leave her surroundings and is ready to be taken advantage of by a sleazy ghoul.

18. Winter River has a Cantonese place?

19. "Don't bait your mother, Pumpkin. As soon as we get settled, we'll build you a darkroom in the basement, okay?" "My whole life is a dark room. One. Big. Dark. Room." Oh, how I love that line reading from Winona. That. Line. Read. Ing.

20. There's those rubberneckers I mentioned. Plus one last appearance from Jane, with the surprising tidbit that she decorated the Maitlands' place. You would think that Adam and Barbara had hung onto stuff that previously belonged to their parents and grandparents. Also, Jane does it all! Notice that earlier in the movie, a sign establishes her as the town realtor and travel agent.

21. Decades after the heyday of the Crazy Ernie/Cal Worthington style of local commercials, Betelgeuse's ad is still hilarious. "And hey, if you act now, you get a free demon possession with every exorcism. Now, you can't beat that, can you?" 

22. Again, Beetlejuice's writers were geniuses. They realize that less is more. It'll be interesting when I watch Child's Play, to see how long it takes before Chucky's established as evil. We've got 20 more minutes until Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) gets his grand introduction, at roughly the movie's halfway point.

23. The Maitlands pay a visit to the netherworld's equivalent of a social services office. One more bit of key information is given (that they'll be able to leave their home and/or Earth in 125 years), and we also learn that two months have passed since they died, but the scene is best remembered for its sight gags. Miss Argentina and the jungle hunter with the shrunken head have followings, but I'm partial to the guy with a chicken bone in his throat. On stage, Miss Argentina is played by Delia's actress and leads a song about how life is better than death.

24. Also on stage, Juno (played here by Sylvia Sidney) isn't just Beetlejuice's ex-boss, she's also his mother. That plot twist did nothing for me. How can you improve on Sidney's I-have-no-time-for-this-bullshit characterization? Anyway, by the time Adam and Barbara meet Juno, it's been five months since they died and Delia has completed redecorating their place.

25. Charles trying to sell Maxie Dean (Robert Goulet) on investing in Winter River ("I can buy the whole town.") plays funnier in the wake of Schitt's Creek.

26. The Saturday morning Beetlejuice cartoon was a staple of my childhood, something I saw long before the movie that inspired it. A good 10 or so years after that, I read the show's Jump the Shark page, where one viewer complained about Adam and Barbara not even being included. Rewatching the scenes where the Maitlands get to know Lydia (which I also remember were a highlight of the musical) reminds me that the complaint was valid.

27. "You can see us without the sheets." "Of course I can see you." "Well, how is it that you can see us but nobody else can?" "Well, I read through that Handbook for the Recently Deceased. It says, 'Live people ignore the strange and unusual.' I myself am strange and unusual." "You look like a regular girl to me."

28. With nowhere else to turn, the Maitlands finally meet the ghost with the most. Something I'm just now thinking of: was Betelgeuse's "Guide" hat an homage to David Lee Roth, or at least what he represented? You can easily imagine Betelgeuse as a hedonist rock star. Shoot, that might even have been a cartoon plot.

29. I'm watching Beetlejuice to appraise actresses, but it cannot be denied. Keaton is acting his dick off here. Fun with foreshadowing: Desson Howe's review said Michael had "the most fun with a male role since Jack Nicholson's devil in The Witches of Eastwick." Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times, said "the film seems to be crying out to be a musical."

30. Barbara and Adam, creeped out, abandon Betelgeuse and set out to disrupt Delia's dinner party. Susan Kellermann is another actress appearing in two movies this month. She'll return for Elvira, Mistress of the Dead. Anyway, you can have Bernard the agent (Dick Cavett) and Grace the reporter (Susan). The real star of the party scene is Beryl (Adelle Lutz). I'd watch a movie that's just her and Otho snarking at each other.

31. "I would rather talk about ... Day-O! Daay-O! Daylight come and me wan' go home ..." Aside from being a hilarious, instant classic sequence, the "Day-O" performance is notable because it subverts what was expected for a haunting. Everyone's startled by the experience, but they claim afterwards to have had fun. The closest thing that comes to mind is early in Poltergeist, when Diane experiments with the ghosts.

32. "Lydia, I have a chance to teach you something here. You have got to take the upper hand in all situations or people, whether they are dead or alive, will walk all over you!"

33. Shadix has been hamming it up so far, which is not a bad thing. It makes his comparatively understated work when Otho finds the handbook all the better.

34. We already know that Winter River has gone from the site of Charles' fresh start to a potential money-making location for him, but I still laughed as the pretentious-to-honest transition when about turning "this place into the leading supernatural research center ... an amusement park!" Barbara may protest, but I think Charles deserved to be tossed from that second floor landing by the Betelgeuse snake.

35. Lydia composing her suicide note includes more A+ line readings from Ryder. "I am alone. *crumples paper, starts again* I am utterly alone. By the time you read this, I will be gone, having jumped *scratches out word* having plummeted off the Winter. River. Bridge." On stage, Lydia's motivation for suicide was that she missed her dead birth mother, who, oddly enough, never actually appeared despite Lydia and Charles visiting the netherworld. Anyway, in the movie, Lydia's "just" depressed.

36. More than an hour in and Betelgeuse finally meets Lydia. Barbara and Adam, who have resolved to share their home with the Deetzes ("Adam, I want to be with Lydia.") arrive just in time.

37. "Wait, what am I worried about? Otho, you can't even change a tire." Some more first class Shadixing, as Otho leads what was intended to be a séance. Beetlejuice's Wikipedia page says that the event was actually an accidental exorcism.

38. I like the visual of Adam and Barbara manifesting in their wedding clothes and then aging into what I'd assume they might look like after having drowned and spent half a year buried. Obviously, nobody was going to allow the two people at the top of Beetlejuice's cast credits spend the movie's last 15 or so minutes as decaying corpses, so it's not too surprising that the Maitlands eventually look normal again.

39. Lydia seeks help from Betelgeuse, who wants something in return. It they marry, it will set him free and let him be able to exist outside the netherworld. Betelgeuse gets rid of Maxie, his wife and Otho (that leisure suit!), holds the Deetzes hostage, temporarily gets rid of the Maitlands and intends to hold Lydia to her promise. Barbara to the rescue! Well, being eaten by a sandworm is one way of dying ...

40. Yet another thought I'm just now having: Adam and Barbara are continuing their 125 years on Earth. Suppose Charles and Delia live out the rest of their lives in Winter River, maybe also dying young. Ditto Lydia. Will the process go on and on and on? I wonder how many spirits that house can hold.

41. "Shake, shake, shake, Senora, shake your body line ..."

Thoughts:

-- "It obviously doesn't do any good to pull your heads off in front of people if they can't see you."
-- Box Office: Beetlejuice was a big hit, grossing $73.7 million on a $15 million budget and spending four weekends at No. 1.

-- Awards Watch: The makeup won the Oscar and Saturn awards, also being nominated for a BAFTA. The special effects were both Saturn and BAFTA-nominated. Beetlejuice won other Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film and Supporting Actress (Sidney), also getting nominated for Supporting Actor (Keaton), Burton's direction, the screenplay and Danny Elfman's music, which I'm sorry to just now be mentioning. Other nominations included the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, the Kids Choice Award for Favorite Movie and the Youth in Film Award for Best Fantasy (which it won).

-- "Delia, you are a flake. You have always been a flake. If you insist on frightening people, do it with your sculpture."

-- Critic's Corner, the movie: "By the time this irresistible treat is over, it has created some of the funniest moments and most inspired visual humor and design we may expect to experience at the movies all year," Thomas raved. Rita Kempley called it a "stylish screwball blend of Capraesque fantasy, Marx Brothers anarchy and horror parody." "It's technically sophisticated and so amiable and well meaning ... (but) more of a bore to watch than to describe," Vincent Canby wrote. Janet Maslin: "There really isn't much plot here, only a parade of arbitrary visual tricks." Roger Ebert said he wanted more of the Maitlands' "sweet romanticism" and less gimmickry and slapstick. David Denby found Burton to be "rabid, undomesticated -- probably a comic genius of some sort or other but at this point too impatient to bring order to the brilliant profusion of his ideas."

-- Critic's Corner, the actors: "Mr. Keaton could have saved Beetlejuice for me, but he's really a supporting character, not on screen long enough to pull things together," Canby wrote. Vincent also thought Baldwin "looks and behaves rather like an un-neurotic William Hurt."

-- Critic's Corner, the actresses: Davis, according to Kempley, was "a natural blithe spirit, like a female Tom Selleck, who gives a dimpled congeniality to the proceedings." "After 60 years as a stellar dramatic actress (Sidney) proves to be a sharp comedian," Thomas observed. "O'Hara ... shows us that Delia is so funny because she is absolutely humorless."

-- Hey, It's the 1980s!: Lydia is the only person at the "Day-O" dinner party not to have been in Vanity Fair.

-- "My wife and I would like to ask you a couple of questions." "Sure, sure, sure, go ahead, shoot." "Well, for instance, uh, what are your qualifications?" "*normal voice* Ah, well, I attended Julliard, I'm a graduate of the Harvard Business School, I travel quite extensively. *increasingly agitated* I lived through the Black Plague and I had a pretty good time during that. I've seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier EVERY SINGLE TIME I see it. Not to mention the fact that you're talking to a dead guy! NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK?! You think I'm qualified?"

-- Next: Patty Hearst. On deck: The Last Temptation of Christ.