Man, Tim Burton's Movies Used to be So Great
When I was nine years old I watched Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in the theater at the mall where my dad worked briefly as a real estate agent. I was blown away. It was literally the best movie that I had ever seen. I loved everything about it.
So I went back to the theater and saw it again and again and again. I probably saw it five or six times in the theater and many more times on home video and television.
By that point I had taken to compulsively reading Leonard Maltin’s film guides so I started to notice who wrote and directed movies as well as who acted them.
I became quite knowledgable. In the early days of The A.V Club they used to call me the human IMDB because I often knew who wrote or directed or acted in even extremely obscure movies. When you have no friends and are permanently depressed you have plenty of time to acquire useless information and brother, I have acquired my share.
My knowledge of pointless factoids became much less valuable with the rise of the internet and cell phones. Today anyone with a cell phone can learn who wrote or directed or starred in a movie with just a few seconds of Googling.
I knew that Tim Burton directed Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, my favorite movie, so he instantly became my favorite filmmaker.
The eighties and nineties were a wonderful time to be a Tim Burton super-fan. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was followed by 1988’s Beetlejuice, another wildly imaginative instant cult classic seemingly made for weirdoes like myself.
It was dark. It was funny. It had amazing, iconic characters. Incidentally, the studio, being stupid cowards, were very nervous about releasing the film under the name Beetlejuice because nothing about it screamed, “Funny, accessible horror comedy about ghosts.”
They reportedly suggested House Ghosts as a more commercial replacement and, in disgust, Burton countered with Scared Sheetless and was mortified when the studio actually seemed to consider his deliberately terrible title for the movie.
I was a thirteen year old boy when Batman came out. The release of a new Tim Burton movie was exciting enough in its own right. The fact that it was a Batman movie with music by Prince with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in the leads made it a bona fide pop culture event. I remember reading the novelization before seeing the movie and being annoyed that it contained several scenes that aren’t in the film.
I was even more enamored of Burton’s deeply personal follow-up Edward Scissorhands. As an unhappy child convinced that he had nothing to offer a world he did not understand and also that a bewildering world had nothing to offer him, the movie spoke to to me in a profound and powerful way. You better believe I identified with the title character and wept at the end.
Burton continued to hit it out of the park with every new movie. Batman Returns! The Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas! Ed Wood! Mars Attacks!
Looking back, Mars Attacks was the end of the filmmaker’s golden age. 1999’s flawed but sometimes compelling Sleepy Hollow marked the first time in Burton’s career where it felt like he was doing what people expected him to do rather than projects that genuinely excited him.
2001’s Planet of the Apes was Burton’s first out and out disaster. Everything felt off, beginning with the inexplicable choice of Mark Wahlberg as the lead.
I liked 2003’s Big Fish and 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street but otherwise new Burton films inspired dread instead of anticipation.
I didn’t just dislike 2010’s Alice in Wonderland. I found it dispiritingly bad and boring. With 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Burton officially lurched into joyless self-parody.
A creative genius who never seemed to run out of ideas now seems intent on lazily self-cannibalizing everything that once made him great.
My son is now eight years old and his favorite filmmaker is Tim Burton. It started, of course, with The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie I have seen maybe three hundred times.
Then he moved on to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Mars Attacks. It’s been a wonderful experience re-watching these movies again through Declan’s eyes.
I was going to show him Ed Wood but forgot what a central role Bela Lugosi’s addiction to morphine plays in it. Needless to say, that is not a good movie to show an eight year old with an all too vivid imagination.
You know how sometimes you’ll watch something you loved as a kid and it will leave you cold as an adult? That definitely has not happened with Burton’s early films. They’re timeless and transcendent.
They really are that good.
Burton is coming off one of his biggest hits in years in the Wednesday television show. I haven’t seen it but everything I’ve heard about it suggests that it fits snugly into Burton pursuing the most predictable, on-brand and boring projects imaginable.
Burton’s next project is a Beetlejuice sequel that has been in development forever (as is to be expected when you’re following up a movie that is thirty-five years old). It’s the most obvious possible project for Burton and my expectations for it are, needless to say, very low.
I’ve had a blast revisiting Burton’s golden age with my son. It will be less fun trudging through his unfortunate decline.
Then again that happens to a lot of great directors. They start off strong with a strong, distinctive aesthetic and a clear sense of what they want to say and how to say it. Then they fall into the trap of repeating themselves to massively diminishing returns.
Then there are filmmakers like Wes Anderson or Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg who find a way to remain relevant and important for a period of decades. But they’re the exception, unfortunately.
It’s more likely that a filmmaker will debut with a film that is important and good and illustrates all that they’re capable of and end their careers with a movie they were able to get made (no small feat in a business as brutal and competitive as the film industry) but are mercenary rather than personal.
It’s too bad Tim Burton has fallen so far but that also speaks to the incredible heights he reached early in his once glorious career.
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