‘Beetlejuice’: Tim Burton, Michael Keaton on the Ghoulish Masterpiece

It’s hard to imagine someone being instantly in sync with Pee-wee Herman, but in 1984, when 26-year-old Tim Burton was asked to direct his first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he brought something special to the party: a passion for wacko individualists. “I believed Pee-wee,” Burton says, without a trace of irony. “So I thought, ‘Let’s just go through the movie and believe him, whatever he does.’ I love extreme characters who totally believe themselves. That’s why I had fun with Betelgeuse.”

Betelgeuse, played by Michael Keaton, is the anarchic superspook of Beetlejuice, which Burton has directed like a cheerfully indulgent parent – he lets his little monsters run wild, to the exclusion of pace, point and structure. This isn’t your standard, slick ghost comedy – the plot chases its own tail, and the jokes are a blend of the brainy and the infantile. The picture, a whatzit, has provoked its share of bewildered reviews. The fat guy and the other one didn’t like it, and The New York Times said it was for people who think a shrunken head is funny.

Luckily for Burton, millions of people think a shrunken head is funny, especially when it sits on top of a full-sized body and stares out of bulging, doleful eyes. Beetlejuice grossed about $32 million in its first two weeks, and Burton has relaxed and made the most of his movie’s addled reception.

“I’ve been enjoying the bad reviews,” he says ebulliently. “These bland newscasters, they have to say the word ‘Beetlejuice,’ and they have to show a clip – and I don’t care what anybody says, it makes me wanna see the movie. It’s really funny. It’s like you’re watching some hallucination, like somebody’s putting something else behind them that they don’t know about. It was like the feeling I got when I saw Andy Warhol on The Love Boat.”

Burton, a former animator, thrives on weird juxtapositions – they’re the key to his genius. His style is dork chic: he wears shapeless, oversize jackets, and his hair is shoulder length. Under heavy lids, he has sad, spacey eyes. He’s the sort of guy who uses words like “nutty” without ironic emphasis, who pronounces something “great, great, great – like, so cool” and then, to illustrate a point, casually sketches a bizarre creature with a second head coming out of its mouth.

Amiable and unpretentious, he has a whiff of stoned melancholy about him, like someone who thinks too much and makes sense of too little. And that’s where he nestles his movies, in that twilight zone between the humdrum and the flabbergasting. If the two don’t quite gel, so much the better – and funnier.

“The things that interest me the most are the things that potentially won’t work,” Burton says. “On Beetlejuice, I could tell every day what was gonna work and what wasn’t. And that was very invigorating. Especially when you’re doing something this extreme. A lot of people have ragged on the story of Beetlejuice, but when I read it, I thought, ‘Wow! This is sort of interesting. It’s very random. It doesn’t follow what I would consider the Spielberg story structure.’ I guess I have to watch it more, because I’m intrigued by things that are perverse. Like, I was intrigued that there was no story.”

Beetlejuice is a haunted-house comedy turned inside out: Its heroes are a pair of attractive, lovable ghosts driven bats by ghoulish people. When they can’t take any more, they call in the title character, a “bio-exorcist.” As played by Michael Keaton, with frazzled hair, rotted teeth and fungoid cheeks, the scuzzy con man blasts the movie into slapstick heaven – he’s a sleazeball wizard.

Until his entrance, the picture has been funny in spurts but something else, too: goggle-eyed, a little sad. At the start, a couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are killed in a freak accident; as ghosts, they learn they must remain in their rustic New England home for 125 years. Into their afterlives come the new owners: a screechingly tasteless sculptor (Catherine O’Hara); her geeky husband (Jeffrey Jones); and their sweet but morbid daughter (Winona Ryder), who dresses like a witch to express her inner weirdness. The ghosts aren’t malicious – they just hate seeing their cozy domicile turned into a Soho house of horror. So they do things like sever their own heads – while the living, who can’t see them, remain oblivious.

If you’ve ever felt out of place, you’ll plug into the ghosts’ awkwardness – and into Burton’s dopey, matter-of-fact surrealism. Aside from Betelgeuse (the spelling has been simplified for the title), no one quite fits in. The afterlife isn’t grand and Spielbergian but a mangy series of typing pools and waiting rooms, in which you have to take a number to see your caseworker. Next to you sit horribly mutilated people in the state they were in when they bit the big one, but used to it now, so they’re blasé, as if they weren’t charred or squashed.

When Burton first read Michael McDowell’s script, he thought he could have written it himself – it carried his trademark blend of the outlandish and the matter-of-fact. In Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, for instance, the trucker Large Marge turns toward the camera and her eyes balloon out of her skull; then they retract and she goes on talking, as if nothing unusual had happened. And in Beetlejuice, Keaton’s head spontaneously gyrates on its shoulders; when it stops, he asks, slightly peeved, “Don’t ya’ hate it when that happens?”

The deadpan style resembles the great Warner Bros. cartoons, and the best gags are like jack-in-the-boxes – they zoom out of the screen and then snap back in. The disorientation is exhilarating. In Beetlejuice, Burton deftly blurs the line between a large model of the New England town (in which Betelgeuse, bug size, makes his home), “real life” and the afterlife. Bo Welch, who designed the sets, describes it as “a hierarchy of reality that leads you into unreality. Tim would encourage me to push that border. I’d go a certain distance, and he’d say, ‘Let’s go further,’ and I’d go, ‘Arrghhh!’ and then be thrilled when we did it.”