'BEETLEJUICE' IS PAP FOR THE EYES

By Vincent Canby

From The New York Times, 05.08.1988, Late City Final Edition

Beetlejuice, which is quickly turning into a hit of serious proportions (it earned more than $9 million in its first three weeks of release), is a farce for our place and time. It's technically sophisticated and so amiable and well meaning that it seems rude to point out that, like some of our public figures, it is more of a bore to watch than to describe.

In the manner of most of the programming we see on television, Beetlejuice has been designed to be utterly painless. It passes in front of the eyes and is gone. In a society where the economic necessity is to please as many people as possible, the creation of something that doesn't offend has become an art.

Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin, who looks and behaves rather like an un-neurotic William Hurt) and his wife, Barbara (Geena Davis, a full-lipped, dark-eyed beauty), are very much in love with each other, with their placid lives and with their big, comfortable old house in Connecticut. Within the first few minutes of the film, they are in a fatal automobile accident. Adam and Barbara are suddenly shades, confined to their house while trying to protect it and their privacy from the house's gauche new owners.

Even with the aid of the "Handbook for the Recently Deceased," Adam and Barbara are duds as ghosts. Haunting isn't easy. Adam and Barbara turn up in all sorts of ghastly incarnations, including headless and skinless, but the self-absorbed new owners look right through them. They receive no satisfaction from Juno (Sylvia Sidney), their caseworker. Juno has the patience of an employee at the Motor Vehicle Bureau. When they complain, she instructs them to go home and read the book.

Adam and Barbara are desperate. They turn to a renegade demon named Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a people exterminator who advertises his services on television ("Unhappy with eternity? Having trouble adjusting?").

It's at this point that Beetlejuice begins to take on life. Wearing a mothy fright wig and whitish makeup, Mr. Keaton recalls some worn-out but manic burlesque comic, a Bobby Clark of the hereafter, a leering, fast-talking lecher who admits that, after 600 years of celibacy, "I'm feeling a little anxious." Even as I write this, I have the terrible feeling that I'm making Beetlejuice sound funnier than it is to sit through, which I have now done twice. Because the audiences at both matinees were small, I can only assume that attendance in the evenings and on weekends is huge.

It must also be that Beetlejuice is a comedy that desperately needs a laugh track, whether canned or the kind provided by a large audience that guffaws at special effects, levitation, grotesque monster makeup and ventriloquism. There wasn't a peep to be heard the first time I saw the film.

The only pleased grunts I heard the second time were my own, once when Mr. Keaton's Beetlejuice made an obscene gesture toward the innocent Barbara and another time when Adam and Barbara, visiting the headquarters of purgatory, are shown a fish tank full of bizarre creatures. The explanation: the creatures are lost souls--ghosts who have been exorcised ("That's death for the dead").

There are funny ideas in the screenplay, but either they are undeveloped by the writers or they are thrown away through what appears to be Tim Burton's shapeless direction. This may not be an oversight but, rather, the influence of a kind of television comedy show in which gags don't grow one out of another but succeed one another, randomly.

Such randomness is the style of Pee-wee Herman, the aging elf whose first feature, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, was directed by Mr. Burton (and was also a big box-office hit). Mr. Keaton could have saved Beetlejuice for me, but he's really a supporting character, not on the screen long enough to pull things together. All he does is show up the genteel silliness of gags making fun of interior decorators, second-rate artists and, I suppose, the acute shortage of luxury housing everywhere.

Beetlejuice is, at least, painless. It is true to its own small ends.