BIG EYES – The Review

Director Tim Burton has stepped away from fantasy, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter for the first time in at least a decade and the result is one of his best films. BIG EYES tells the true story of Margaret Ulbrick (Amy Adams), a divorced artist who lands in San Francisco, young daughter in tow, in the late 1950s. Her work, at first mostly portraits of her daughter, takes the cute but sad form of waifish children with dark, enormous eyes. She soon finds herself remarried, this time to the ridiculously charming Walter Keane (Christoph Watlz), a successful real estate salesman who paints bland Paris street scenes in his spare time. When he can’t get his or Margaret’s art exhibited in the hip art gallery run by bohemian Jason Schwartzman, he works out a deal to get the paintings displayed outside the restrooms at the ‘Hungry I’ jazz nightclub across the street. Walter scores free publicity when he fights with the club’s owner (Jon Polito), and the paintings start to sell. Before you know it, Walter is taking credit for Margaret’s work, which becomes best-selling kitsch. The paintings revolutionize the commercialization and accessibility of popular art with copies of the works selling in department stores and such. Walter convinces Margaret that nobody would buy the paintings if they knew they were painted by a woman, so why not both get rich simply passing them off as his? This goes on for years until Margaret, inspired by a visit from Jehovah’s Witnesses, has enough and takes the increasingly volatile Walter to court.

A fairly straightforward biography, BIG EYES is insightful and funny – one of my favorite films this year. There’s a scene where Margaret sees her big eyes on everyone in a grocery store but Burton mostly dials down his signature oddball flourishes and stays focused on the story. There is whimsy in the art direction and set design that goes hand-in-hand with the director’s sensibilities and Keane’s macabre paintings themselves are right at home with his well- established ghoulish palate. It helps that he’s working with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the pair that wrote his last bio, ED WOOD in 1994. Their smart script avoids the pitfall of making simplistic one-to-one connections between the artist’s life and her paintings. This is a movie about the dominant and submissive roles of marriage in a less-enlightened time and about Margaret’s heartbreak and guilt of being forced to lie to the public and to her daughter. The issue of fraud is a messy one, as Margaret consented to the deceit. She may have been uncomfortable with the duplicity, but she played along with it and reaped the monetary gain.

BIG EYES contains fine supporting performances from Shwartzman as well as Terence Stamp as an arrogant NYT art critic, Krysten Ritter as Margaret’s big-eyed buddy, James Saito as a wise judge, and Danny Huston as a journalist whose narration seems tacked on. But it’s Mr. and Mrs. Keane that are at the center of BIG EYES and the two leads are superb. I don’t know if Amy Adams knows how to paint, but she knows how to look like she’s painting. She also knows how to convincingly play a weak, trembling character, which is what Margaret is until she finally stands up to the bully that is her husband. Adams is so frail and emotional that you feel her pain during Walter’s betrayals and cheer her on during her triumphs. Christoph Waltz is being criticized by some for playing Walter too broadly. When confronted with his deceit and later put on trial, he buffoonishly resorts to foot-stomping, eye-rolling tantrums. Walter can’t accept the fact he’s a failure and the comically pathetic way he acts out seems real to me. This script is too smart to let him descend into a cartoon, no matter how hard he seems to try. After a stretch of uneven films, it’s good to see Tim Burton back in form. BIG EYES is highly recommended.

5 of 5 Stars