A drama about the awakening of the painter Margaret Keane, her
phenomenal success in the 1950s, and the subsequent legal difficulties
she had with her husband, who claimed credit for her works in the 1960s.
Director:Tim Burton
Writers:Scott Alexander,
Larry Karaszewski
Stars:Amy Adams,
Christoph Waltz,
Danny Huston
Storyline
In San Francisco in the 1950s, Margaret was a woman trying to make it on
her own after leaving her husband with only her daughter and her
paintings. She meets gregarious ladies' man and fellow painter Walter
Keane in a park while she was struggling to make an impact with her
drawings of children with big eyes. The two quickly become a pair with
outgoing Walter selling their paintings and quiet Margaret holed up at
home painting even more children with big eyes. But Walter's actually
selling her paintings as his own. A clash of financial success and
critical failure soon sends Margaret reeling in her life of lies. With
Walter still living the high life, Margaret's going to have to try
making it on her own again and re-claiming her name and her paintings.
User Reviews
Tim
Burton has crafted quite a reputation as a director of the surreal and
the macabre. In his films, he conjures up dark, Gothic images of death
and despair, but suffuses them with his special brand of bittersweet
magic and whimsy. On the surface, Big Eyes is right up his alley - this
true story of the fiercest and most outrageous copyright battle in art
history centres on a series of big-eyed waifs, almost ghostly figures of
hope and horror that fit perfectly into Burton's aesthetic. And yet,
barring a few scenes, the final film is curiously characterless: a
competently-made, shrewdly- cast biopic that never quite troubles the
heart or spirit the way Burton's films can do.
Margaret (Amy
Adams) is trying to scrape together a living for herself and her young
daughter when she meets Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), a charismatic
real-estate broker who would rather make a name for himself as an
artist. He offers her a home, love and financial security, and she quite
happily takes his surname as her own. Once they are married, Walter
keeps trying to break into the notoriously snobby art world, selling his
own Parisian landscapes and Margaret's portraits of wistful young girls
with enormous eyes. But it's her art - simply signed as 'Keane' - that
grabs the attention and, as one white lie leads to another, Margaret
suddenly finds herself shoved into the background. Walter has taken
credit for her work, and is well on his way to transforming it into a
global phenomenon.
There are many big ideas swirling around in
Big Eyes: art, deceit, integrity, commercialism and love are shaken
liberally and stirred through with deeper issues of sexism and
psychological abuse. This comes through pretty well in the film, which
paints a chilling picture of Margaret's enforced anonymity. As her
husband delights in dominating newpaper headlines and picking fights
with famed art critics like John Canaday (Terence Stamp), she fades
almost literally into the background
- creating ever more pieces of art for him in the solitude of her attic
studio,
lying even to her daughter about her life's work. The film also draws a
canny, subtle distinction between the artist and the businessman:
Walter may not be much of the former, but his skills as the latter are
what drag Margaret's work from county fairs onto the international
stage.
Through it all, Burton exercises a light - almost
impersonal - touch. He scatters a few scenes into the film that hint at
his trademark film-making style: Margaret bumps into a crass supermarket
display of her art, and suddenly everyone around her sports the limpid,
haunting eyes of the waifs no one knows are hers. But, for the most
part, Burton keeps himself out of the proceedings. It's proof that he
can create nightmares on a more subtle and realistic level, capturing
the darker side of life as it can be rather than as he imagines it.
Occasionally, however, the film begs the question whether he should -
it's stuffy and dry, never quite engaging either the heart or the
imagination.
That's through no fault of his cast. Adams anchors
Big Eyes with an astounding portrayal of a complex woman: one who's
willing to cast off the chains of her first marriage, only to wind up
tangled in the snare of another. It would be easy to play Margaret as a
victim, but Adams finds the bitter strength in someone who must endure
untold torment in a world and home that constantly remind her she's too
weak to succeed on her own. Waltz's performance, on the other hand, is
puzzling - he plays Walter in the constant key of manic, right from the
start, so that the character's smooth, smug charm is all you ever see of
the man. There is something undeniably delicious, though, about Waltz's
Walter when the cracks begin to show: he simmers his way into a kind of
monstrous madness, which lends both drama and humour to the proceedings
when Margaret finally brings her claim to court.
On the evidence
of Big Eyes, there's hope yet for Burton if he would like to switch to
making more literal films. He unearths plenty of smart, insightful
tension in this troubled marriage, a partnership on unequal terms that
becomes less emotional and more financial by the day. But
the
film also stumbles along at points, bled dry when it should radiate
colour and emotion. It's hard to shake the feeling, too, that Waltz
seems to be under the impression that he's in a more old-school,
over-the-top Burton production. It's at these moments, in particular,
that one might long for a splash of Burton's own personality - the
chance to look at this world, this story and these people through his
eyes.
