It’s so good to have the old gang back again that it seems petty to carp about any aspect of this long-awaited Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reunion. Seventy-three-year-old Michael Keaton is still magnificent as the rampant undead “freelance bioexorcist,” and if he seems a shade slower and less electrically frenetic than in the delightful first Beetlejuice of thirty-five years ago, well, none of us are getting younger.
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, still wearing the Goth widow’s weeds and spiky bangs of her depressed teenage days, remains eerily loveable in perplexed middle age. Only now she’s a real widow troubled by her own alienated daughter, Astrid (the perfectly cast Jenna Ortega of Wednesday), as well as a career as a minor TV celebrity with a spirit-hunting show called Ghost House and a pushy TV producer boyfriend named Rory (Justin Theroux).
Lydia’s mother Delia Deetz (played by the divine Catherine O’Hara) is as daffy and self-centered as the ultrasuccessful conceptual artist she is now (“I am my art”) as she was when she was struggling to get noticed by the art establishment back in 1988. Recall in Beetlejuice when she raved at her mild-mannered, newly retired real estate developer husband, Charles (Jeffrey Jones), about their new house in “the sticks” of Winter River, Connecticut, in a voice rising gradually to a hair-raising scream: “I will live with you in this hellhole, but I must express myself. If you don’t let me gut this house and make it my own, I will go insane, and I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME!”
Charles is no longer with us (presumably because of Jeffrey Jones’s firm cancelation), and his funeral is the event that reunites the three matrilineal generations of the remaining Deetz family. A hilarious Claymation sequence illustrates the account of Charles’s comically grotesque death. An a cappella children’s choir sings the calypso song “Day-O,” so central to the charms of Beetlejuice ’88, at…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Eileen Jones
