#69: Beetlejuice

Release Date: April 1st, 1988

Format: Streaming (Max)

Written by: Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren

Directed by: Tim Burton

4 Stars

Tim Burton was in his twenties while Beetlejuice was in development, and it shows. On this most recent viewing, I was stuck by the ignorant confidence of this messy, rawly creative flick. I’m not a Burton cinefile (more an appreciative supporter of his early work), but I get the sense that with Beetlejuice, he feels fully free. He’s not subversively working within the confines of Disney (Frankenweenie) and he’s not the hired gun brought on to realize the vision of another creative weirdo (Paul Rueben’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure).   

Here he is young and confident, and given $15 million, and he is allowed to play. It’s beautiful to see him bloom.

In my review of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I wrote that early Burton films convey a sense of an artist with “a lot of heart…toiling away.” That’s definitely the case with Beetlejuice. It’s what makes his mid-career movies so disappointing. Maybe it was Mars Attacks (a movie I really enjoy) that made him complacently embrace CGI into his work, films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland (films I do not enjoy). But with Beetlejuice, we have a classic case of an artist working creatively at the margins of what is technically possible in their time, and instead of restricting their vision, it forces their creativity to flood into strange crevices and corners, to pool and fester and grow.

Beetlejuice shows Tim Burton, the weirdo goth kid from sunny southern California, finding the creative voice that powers his best work. It’s a modern classic.