Tim Burton Is Great Again

A long-awaited sequel revels in gore and nostalgia.

- ALISON WILLMORE

MIDWAY THROUGH Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) demands to know, “Where’s the obnoxious little goth girl who tormented me all those years ago?” The flamboyant conceptual artist is talking to her stepdaughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), who has grown from the morose teenager of Beetlejuice (1988) into the middle-aged star of a hokey ghost-hunting reality show, but you get the feeling that this is a question director Tim Burton could just as well be posing to himself. The original film was born in Burton’s hectic creative heyday, before he got mired in moribund Disney remakes and bewildering adaptations starring (an otherwise great) Eva Green. Like his character Lydia, who describes what she’s done as selling out, Burton passed from a youthful infatuation with darkness into more grown-up concerns, among them whichever one made 2019’s Dumbo seem like a good idea. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in some ways itself a product of those concerns, both as a 36-years later sequel and as a story about how Lydia has since stepped into the position of the distracted parent who’s unable to connect with her own moody child. And yet somehow there's nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.