Monday, October 21, 2013

The Undiscovered Country and Western

Beetlejuice (1988)
directed by Tim Burton
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library

For all of the jokes about bureaucracy in the afterlife, Beetlejuice is fundamentally a secular vision of heaven as a great day with the person you love. The Maitlands die in a car crash on the first morning of a two-week vacation they planned to spend more or less indoors, working on odd projects in one another's company. Although they're understandably surprised to discover they perished in the river beneath the covered bridge, the quest they undertake through the brick door in the attic is above all an effort to be left alone, free to build models and watch the countryside from a kitchen with a tea kettle.

It isn't the stop-motion sandworm that waits on the surface of Saturn just outside their front door that bothers Barbara and Adam, but the uninvited guests who insist on access to every room in the house. Even the guests are alright, eventually, once they see the merits in rural living (a visual shorthand for introversion). For Lydia, the lonely teenager, Adam and Barbara are people she cares about and won't ever have to lose. She socializes more once her new, larger family settles in; whatever planet she's on, she can always go home.

I was aware of death at an early age, and afraid of it, and I knew that even my longest, most idle summers would not last forever, no matter how far away life and adulthood seemed. Michael Keaton makes such a brief appearance in Beetlejuice that he is less a villain than a strange traveler from the wider world. He's the neighbor you like to catch up with but not run into every day. Only Maxie and Otho are grimly dispatched; there is no place in heaven for capitalists and sycophants, men without vision or spark.

Simply put, this isn't their picture. IMDb doesn't source its assertion that Geena Davis was the only cast member to commit the first time around, but of course she was; Geena Davis is the Geena Davis of your dreams. 1988 was a long time ago, but Alec Baldwin was so handsome at 30. Tim Burton never made a better movie.