In Venice, the world’s oldest film festival founded by Fascists officially got underway Wednesday night with an impassioned ode to the magic of cinema. In movies, Italian actress Sveva Altiti proclaimed, “We are enveloped and surrender ourselves to enchantment … Through the eyes of cinema, we look at the world in a new way.” Upon which everyone sat down to watch a movie in which Winona Ryder gives birth to a demonic baby who immediately starts trying to eat her. Beetlejuice is back!
Film festivals can often be pompous affairs, full of endless gatekeeping, infinite gradations of status, and extremely specific dress codes. The selection of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the opening-night selection for the 81st Venice Film Festival might well be considered a natural immunization. From its title on down, this is a movie that can’t help but undercut any sense of pomposity around the occasion. While searching for a last-minute ticket to the opening ceremony, I found myself desperately emailing an Italian man I’d never met asking, “Ticket for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?” — four words that immediately reminded me of my tiny place in the universe.
Thus the fantastic high-low mix of Wednesday night on the Lido, in which the crème de la crème of the global cinema community came together to watch Beetlejuice quite literally spill his guts. Jury president Isabelle Huppert was on hand to officially open the festival in three different languages at once, and though I didn’t catch whether she stuck around for the movie, if she did we would’ve finally be able to answer the question of what Isabelle Huppert thinks of children’s choruses somberly intoning “Banana Boat (Day-O)” and extended dance sequences set to “MacArthur Park.” (The singer who opened the evening with a mournful Italian love ballad, whose name has apparently gone unreported in the English-language press, did sit through all of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though I was unable to get her full review.)
Clad in mandatory black tie, the Venice audience chuckled at jokes about Santas getting burned up in fireplaces and environmentalist do-gooders getting eaten by piranhas as well as a scene in which Burton’s partner, Monica Bellucci, playing Beetlejuice’s ex-wife from hell, sucks Danny DeVito’s character’s soul out of his body, leaving him a crumpled-up bag of flesh. Perhaps some of these luminaries noted, as I did, how the movie sidesteps the unpleasant fact that original cast member Jeffrey Jones has since become a convicted sex offender by only depicting his character via animated flashback, and then (spoiler alert) turning him into a walking gushing corpse missing the entire top third of his body. Such is the spirit of Beetlejuice: Anything can be a gag if you let it be a gag.
This is not how things have typically gone at Venice, which tends to kick off with auteur fare like Eyes Wide Shut, First Man, and Parallel Mothers. (Before this year, the silliest opening-night selection in recent memory was 2017’s Downsizing, which nevertheless attempted a level of social critique Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, thankfully, entirely uninterested in.) Perhaps after last year’s strike-marred festival, Venice relished the opportunity to bring stars like Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and newcomer Jenna Ortega to the Lido. Perhaps the film got a boost from the festival bookers owing to a new revelation about Beetlejuice’s backstory: Before he became a green-haired bio-exorcist, our rascally anti-hero was a medieval Italian! Or perhaps this newfound love of jokey horror was meant to tie into one of this year’s lifetime-achievement honorees, Sigourney Weaver, whose preshow clip reel gave pride of place to her work in Ghostbusters.
Or maybe Venice saw the same thing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as I did: the triumphant return of a distinct directorial vision. After decades in the wilderness, critics are hailing the return of “the old Tim Burton,” with his love for all things gory, ghoulish, and grotesque. At the film’s press conference Wednesday afternoon, the director said the film was his response to feeling like he’d lost his way artistically. “This movie was reenergizing,” he said, “getting back to the things I love doing, the way I love doing it and with people I love doing it with.”
As for the opening-night crowd, whose age was apparent from the fact that they were exponentially more excited to see Winona Ryder than Jenna Ortega — what did they think? Laughter was a bit more scattered than in my press and industry screening that morning, and the European couple next to me sat in stony silence for much of the movie. But by the final scene, which ends with a development I wouldn’t dare spoil, even they were onboard. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — say it once, say it twice, say it three times.
