So much fun, and over too soon, "Beetlejuice" provides a character, a scene, and a world for the ages

Rating: 9/10 (7 February 2015)

"Beetlejuice" is a fantastically creative movie featuring some of the best-looking sets and most interesting worldbuilding in Tim Burton's filmography. Maybe in anyone's. And yet it also has a charmingly offhanded feel, like something jotted down after a strange dream as it was fading. Nobody seems to have been trying too hard, a common problem in later Burton projects. It builds slowly, one of those movies where the central figure doesn't really appear until deep into the runtime. Like the shark in "Jaws" or E.T. in "E.T.," we want to see Beetlejuice, but the movie smartly holds him back, showing only teasers before the big show.
There's plenty to focus on in the meantime. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are likable guides to the world of the dead, a wry bureaucracy that's also playground for Burton's creature creation and makeup departments. The movie could work as satire if it wanted to, something like Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" set in H.P. Lovecraft's New England. There are waiting rooms and labyrinthine corridors of the dead civil service and a manual for the newly deceased. To go between worlds, Baldwin's character must take a shovel to the foam grass and plywood ground of his scale model of his town, and it's tempting to search this for parallels to the tacky redevelopment going on in the dead couple's home. But really, the whole conceit is too intriguing and lighthearted to serve as earnest commentary or sharp-edged ridicule. The movie speculates that, really, being dead isn't so bad if you can just learn to work the system and get along with people. Being alive isn't so bad either, as long as you don't trample heedlessly over the dead. Having seen the fun that Baldwin and Davis's characters are having after death, it's easy to relate to Winona Ryder's goth girl character, who can see them and decides she prefers them to her snobbish and striving parental units.
A fair amount of plot is squeezed into the movie's 90 minutes, but it all boils down to the question of when somebody is going to say "Beetlejuice" three times and bring Michael Keaton's fast-talking con man out of the scale model and into the real world. Even if you can't catch everything he says—he speaks in clipped grunts with a highly variable cadence—you'll walk away impersonating him. This character, from his clothes to his growl to his lurching and reeling body movements, is a touchstone of movies not unlike the the Tramp in the 1910s and Jack Sparrow in the 2000s. Beetlejuice is a villain, but that's just a slight tweak. There's a line of evolution (not to say improvement, since they're all great) through these male, clownish, unlucky, gregarious, vagabond immortals (it is not to be thought that the Tramp aged between 1914 and 1936.) Keaton is so in tune with his creation that he doesn't need a lot of screen time to make a lasting mark on the culture, but the movie is smart enough not to cheat him out of a grand sequence in the final act anyway.
Oddly though, by the time the finale comes around, the high point has already been reached. And it doesn't involve Beetlejuice at all. It's the scene where the living characters become possessed and dance around a dinner table lip-syncing Harry Belafonte's calypso song "Day-O." Catherine O'Hara shines here, acting with every face muscle and every body muscle but keeping them totally separate. The glamorous costume clothes, the blue lighting in the room, the bizarre sculptures in the background—this scene is an ingenious fusion of styles held together by Burton's pop-art sensibility. If this were all the movie had, it would be worth watching. But "Beetlejuice" is a series of original moments like this. It is so much fun, and over too soon.