DAN WEBSTER:
There’s a reason why theater is represented by a pair of masks that meld expressions of tragedy and comedy. It relates back to the ancient Greeks and their desire to make obvious the sentiments of each individual performer.
Contemporary audiences no longer need such devices, at least not usually. Our sophistication has grown appreciably in the last couple of millennia, as have our abilities to use technology. In movies especially, cameras can capture the slightest hint of a smile, or smirk, telling us much of what we need to know about the emotions an actor is trying to convey.
Of course, the symbolic duality behind the two-faced mask also represents the fact that tragedy and comedy often occur at once. Consider the climactic scene in John Huston’s 1948 film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” when the last of the gold-seeking partners, Tim Holt’s Curtin and Walter Huston’s Howard, discover that the gold dust they’ve worked so hard and sacrificed so much to obtain has blown away in the wind. What else can they do but laugh?
Few of today’s filmmakers – other than, say, the Coen Brothers – have embraced this dualistic notion more so than Tim Burton. In his long career, which began in the 1970s but hit its stride with 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” Burton’s best work has struck a determined balance between all that’s tragic and all that’s comic about life.
That was never more true than in two films that cemented his reputation, 1989’s “Batman” and 1990’s “Edward Scissorhands.” The protagonists of both films – Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne and Johnny Depp’s scissor-handed humanoid – suffer traumatic experiences that shape their respective lives. Yet the films themselves offer up any number of comic moments.
The same holds true for the film that preceded both, 1988’s “Beetlejuice.” An original screenplay, written by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren (and based on a story idea dreamed up by McDowell and Larry Wilson), “Beetlejuice is at heart a comedy. But, too, it’s a comedy about death, with the ghosts played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis vying with the trickster ghost and so-called “bio-exorcist” title character played by Keaton.
In the intervening years, Burton has continued to make films. Slowly, though, over time they became less comic – or at least turned out to be films whose comedy feels far darker. His film adaptations starring Depp – “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Dark Shadows” – are the clearest examples. But now, 36 years later, we have a “Beetlejuice” sequel, titled redundantly “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and Burton – if only for the moment – has recaptured his personal brand of twisted humor.
Keaton reprises his role as the obstreperous title character, though as in the original he is more of a supporting player. The protagonists of what can be referred to as “Beetlejuice 2,” written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, are Lydia Deetz (played by Winona Ryder), her daughter Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) and Lydia’s stepmother Delia (played by Catherine O’Hara).
Lydia, whose ability to communicate with ghosts has led to her starring in her own supernatural television show, discovers that her father has died in an airplane crash (though he survived the crash, he ended up being decapitated by a shark). Returning to the town where her parents once lived (the same house haunted by the characters played in the original film by Baldwin and Davis), Lydia, Astrid and Delia find themselves battling for Astrid’s life when she gets involved with a neighborhood boy (played by Arthur Conti).
And who does Lydia call? Not the Ghostbusters, mind you, but a ghost nonetheless, Beetlejuice himself. Add in Beetlejuice’s demonic ex-wife (played by Monica Bellucci), an other-worldly actor-turned-cop (played by Willem Dafoe) plus Lydia’s unctuous suitor (played by Justin Theroux), and you have a film that, even while revolving around death, invites us all to smile.
Which provides catharsis, another concept that the Greeks knew well and which, it seems, is something that Tim Burton has rediscovered. When it comes to experiencing that delicate balance between tragedy and comedy, Tim Holt’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” character speaks for us all when he says, “You know, the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens.” To which Beetlejuice might retort, “Let's turn on the Juice and see what shakes loose.”
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.