In 1988, Tim Burton imposed his visual signature with Beetlejuicea whimsical comedy with horror overtones. Burton, 30, had worked at Disney, making notable animated shorts (including Frankenweenie) as well as a first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventureinspired by a TV show.
Beetlejuice hinted at what Tim Burton’s cinema would soon become thanks to Batman Or Edward Scissorhands. It featured his favorite themes and recurring motifs, his comic-macabre aesthetic, and his penchant for the Gothic. On the carousel-shaped headdress worn by the famous Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), a self-proclaimed bio-exorcist, sat a figurine resembling Jack, the character Burton had imagined for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) by Henry Selick.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewhich opens this Friday, is not a flawless sequel, but it is at least a reminder of what Tim Burton’s cinema has already been: uncommonly ingenious, wildly imaginative and abundantly inventive.
Looking back Beetlejuicea film from my adolescence, and discovering Beetlejuice Beetlejuice This week I was reminded of a constant in Burton’s bold but uneven cinema: the screenplay has always played a secondary, almost accessory role. The director has never been as concerned with the coherence of the plot as he has with the aesthetics of his staging.
There were some nice ideas in the shaky script of Beetlejuice : this couple who suddenly find themselves in line at the registrar of the afterlife, represented by a heavy inefficient bureaucracy. The fact remains that the originality of the film rested mainly on the direction of Burton (who is not a screenwriter). Fortunately, there was the irreverent (and partly improvised) humor of Michael Keaton to liven up this script without head nor tail (sorry). Burton relied on visual effects and those of the 1980s are dated. His sandworm is worthy of the Dune by David Lynch, which is not a compliment.
Beetlejuice may have cult status among some moviegoers—considering all the people dressed as Betelgeuse I met at the cinema this week—it is one of those films that has aged poorly. Watching it again, I wondered why the charm of some films no longer works after a certain number of years.
It’s not just a question of aesthetics (even if, with all due respect to Generation Z, there is little to be recovered from that of the 1980s). Some films are victims of the fads they wanted to embrace and which pass. Of the spirit of the times that has evaporated. Of discourses and codes, narrative and otherwise, that have evolved.
I recently discovered a rare James Bond film that I had not yet seen, You Only Live Twice (1967) with Sean Connery, from a screenplay by Roald Dahl, the legendary author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and of James and the Giant Peach (from which Tim Burton and Henry Selick made films). The machismo of some scenes and the amateurism of the special effects are so grotesque as to be laughable. However, the film had a substantial budget.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.
Image from the film Dog Day Afternoon
On the other hand, other works have a quality that is difficult to pin down, which seems universal and timeless. All About Eve dates from 1950, but the human relationships evoked by Joseph Mankiewicz (ambition, jealousy) make it a work just as relevant in 2024. All the characters in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) by Sidney Lumet could be played today, without changing a single line of Al Pacino or Chris Sarandon, his lover who wants to change sex.
There are of course conventions that must be accepted in yesterday’s cinema, which we would no longer see today. Cinema techniques are evolving for the better. No doubt that if Brian De Palma were to shoot Obsession (1976) these days, Geneviève Bujold would suddenly no longer play a 10-year-old girl in the same way. But Paul Schrader’s script would be just as enigmatic and John Lithgow’s character, as sinister as the one he plays in Blow Out.
The same year that You Only Live Twice took the poster The Samurai by Jean-Pierre Melville with Alain Delon, which I have just discovered, and whose elegant, chiaroscuro staging has not aged a day. The following year, Stanley Kubrick made a science fiction film that is among the greatest films of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
What makes some films age better than others? There is obviously no magic formula, except that they age well when they are well written, well acted and well directed. But perhaps they age better when we simply keep a good memory of them, linked to a specific era or state of mind. It is with films like haunted houses: some are not worth revisiting.