Big Eyes
4 stars out of 5
Starring: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Terence Stamp, Danny Huston
Directed by: Tim Burton
Running time: 105 minutes
There are two things Tim Burton does better than just about anyone. The first is spinning a mood that rides the funny edge of creepy. The second is creating production design that makes you feel like you’re stuck in the fever dream of a small child.
They’re impressive talents. And they give every one of his films a unique ‘Tim Burton’ imprimatur, but they don’t always add up to a first-rate example of movie magic. A visually propelled filmmaker such as Burton, needs a big, solid tree on which, to hang his baubles, and without a strong story, his heavy imagery can make the branches sag, leaving a spindly, kitschy tree with too much decor.
But give this man a tale as tall and as true as this one about artist Margaret Keane, and he’s going to turn it into a Tim Burton totem pole, an artistic carving, with surreal characters stacked one on top of the other, all in the pursuit of telling a story with spiritual significance.
Big Eyes is the best Burton sculpture since Johnny Depp’s topiary-obsessed Edward Scissorhands, perhaps because it shares the very same theme of creative exile so near and dear to Burton’s heart.
A stylized portrait of both an artist and a particular period in time, Big Eyes winks at popular culture as it offers up the story of Margaret (Amy Adams) and Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) — a married couple who took the fine art world by storm.
Amy Adams appears in a scene from Big Eyes.
Their success was an accident, a freak lightning strike of timing and free publicity, and it happened shortly after they married on impulse. The two barely knew each other, but Margaret was in no position to refuse Walter’s offer of marriage: She was a single mother with an ex-husband looking to assume full custody of their daughter, and she wasn’t making enough money to compete with a privileged lifestyle.
Walter had cash and a gift for gab. An archetypal snake charmer, he grabbed Margaret by the neck and threw her into a basket, promising to keep her safe and well-fed. She didn’t complain either, because she and Walter shared a passion for art.
Moreover, when Walter’s marketing savvy landed them a show at a well-known boho café, where an altercation attracted news photographers, who captured Margaret’s canvases, things started to heat up. People were fascinated by Margaret’s images of wide-eyed waifs. Sure, they were steeped in kitsch sentiment and technically naive, but they were so bizarre and raw, they resonated with a new generation of beatniks and hipsters.
The little boho exhibition space proved limiting, so Walter used his expertise in commercial real estate to open a storefront gallery dedicated to showcasing what was now being called his work — not Margaret’s. At first, it was an innocent misunderstanding that Walter never clarified. But soon, as the big-eyed canvases began to acquire real value, the lie became part of the Keane narrative, leaving Margaret crammed into small rooms, painting in secret. It’s an intellectual-property nightmare, but in the hands of Burton and his fantastic cast, the most disturbing elements become the movie’s biggest assets.
Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams in Big Eyes
For instance, the union of Walter and Margaret is the random event that sets the rest in motion, but doomed as it is, their bad marriage doesn’t produce bloody carpets or broken bones. Waltz and Adams find just the right edge of mental cruelty to keep the audience on tenterhooks while Burton chisels all the discomfort into absurd bouts of humour.
Individually, Adams and Waltz hold their own, and even though the script is weighed down by Walter’s dialogue, Adams makes the most of her minimal words and does the rest of the communicating with her cool, blue doe eyes.
Because Adams has played similarly shy, soft-spoken victim types before, we could wrongly assume there was little effort required for the role, but this is a weirdly demanding part because we have to like and empathize with Margaret, even though she’s milquetoast and makes art that offends the cognoscenti elite. Adams emerges as a girl version of the scissor-handed garden boy: a true eccentric with a vision all her own.
Because this is based on a true story, Burton can’t take the action to the same hyperbolic, hallucinogenic level, but there’s never any doubt about who’s calling the shots. This is a Burton movie through and through, complete with exaggerated themes of alienation and a warped fairy tale feel. And it’s the Burton-esque elements that make it more than a movie-of-the-week starring Allison Janney and John Tesh, because in the end, Margaret Keane is the epitome of a Tim Burton hero: an outcast who never fit in, a melancholy survivor of fads and fashion, and a person who uses the creative process as a mental salve while seeing the artifact itself as more of a human curiosity than a grand declaration on the human condition.