Beetlejuice

Overview

Beetlejuice (1988)
Production Company: The Geffen Company
Producers: Michael Bender, Larry Wilson, Richard Hashimoto
Director: Tim Burton
Screenplay: Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren,
story by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson
Camera: Thomas Ackerman
Music: Danny Elfman
Production Designer: Bo Welch
Cast: Alec Baldwin (Adam Maitland), Geena Davis (Barbara Maitland), Jeffrey Jones (Charles Deetz), Catherine O'Hara (Delia Deetz), Winona Ryder (Lydia Deetz), Michael Keaton (Betelgeuse)
Running time: 92 min

Adam and Victoria Maitland are a young, happily married couple; all they want is to live in the old mansion they've bought, despite many offers from rich people interested in their new home. On their way to the village they have a fatal car accident that turns them into ghosts unable to leave their house. Happy with their fate together, two ghosts haunting their own dream house until the end of time, they are greatly disturbed to find it has been sold to the Deetzes, a snobbish nouveau riche family from the city. They attempt to scare away these new "house guests", but the bureaucratic Afterlife is not very helpful towards the inexperienced ghosts. As a last resort they contact Betelgeuse, a "bio-exorcist" who will help them get rid of the Deetz family. Betelgeuse attempts to return to the land of the living by marrying the Deetzes' daughter Lydia, who has befriended the Maitlands and is the only living person who can actually see them. But in the end his plans are thwarted by the Maitlands and the Deetzes together, and they live happily ever after in their house.

Rather than a coherent, unified plot, Beetlejuice offers a barrage of sight gags, stop-motion animation and over the top characters. The story has been used as an excuse to execute every joke that happens to pop up, and as a whole is very little coherent. The design however is so original, and it has been handled with such a great deal of energy that it is no wonder that Beetlejuice did so well financially. But neither is it a big surprise that so many critics were annoyed by the ramshackle plot and the hokey look the film certainly has.
Apart from the irregularities there is very little to be said about the plot structure: the equilibrium in the Maitland home is disturbed by the arrival of the Deetzes, and this conflict is finally solved after a dangerous climax. Beetlejuice is recognizably a "Tim Burton film" because of a number of elements: the obvious outsider status of Lydia, the real heroine of the picture, who has a morbid love for all things black, and the contrast between the "normal" world of the Deetz family, portrayed as weird within the film, as opposed to the "weird" world of ghosts, monsters and bio-exorcists, which becomes the more normal of the two.