Big Eyes (2014)

Burton's 'Eyes': Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams paint
themselves into a corner in "Big Eyes."

"Big Eyes"

⭐⭐⭐

The curious story of the artist Margaret Keane—whose hundreds of paintings of small, lonely children with enormous, melancholy eyes became a strange sensation in the 1960s—is recounted in “Big Eyes,” an uneven but intriguing tale directed by Tim Burton from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.

The film opens with the just-divorced Margaret (Amy Adams) leaving town with her young daughter seeking a new life in San Francisco. But there’s a paucity of opportunities for a single mom who’s never held a job—a function, the movie underlines, of a male-dominated society—and Margaret ends up desperate, going to small art gatherings in the park and selling her paintings for pocket change.

Enter the smooth-talking Walter (Christoph Waltz), a fellow ostensibly struggling artist out of France, who falls for Margaret at just the right time (her ex-husband has threatened to take custody of their daughter) and, after the new couple is hastily married in Hawaii, uses his raffish wit to worm her work onto the lucrative pop art scene.

There’s only one problem: Walter steals credit for Margaret’s paintings, seduced by sudden celebrity and taking advantage of a public more inclined to believe the next hot artist is a stylish European man and not a housewife from Tennessee. Margaret finds out and is angry and appalled, but continues to paint for him in secret when money and lavish possessions begin rolling in—slaving away with her brushes and canvasses in shadowy, isolated rooms like a character from “Flowers in the Attic.”

But an empire so rooted in subterfuge is bound to collapse. As years go by, the charade eats away at Margaret, who feels something personal to her has been turned into a lie; while Walter finds it increasingly difficult to explain work that he has nothing to do with. The pair finally settles their feud during a preposterously silly courtroom scene.

With Margaret Keane, Burton has found a character with which to explore some distinctly feminist themes while still, thanks to the weird imagery of the paintings themselves, indulging his penchant for the strange and unusual. The most nightmarish scene takes place when Margaret is at the grocery store and the faces of fellow shoppers have all turned into bug-eyed versions of themselves, as though her art had suddenly come to life to haunt her.

Overall, the movie works despite being a bit of a mess. Adams’ sensitive, plucky heroine is easy to root for and the best reason to watch, but counterpart Waltz overplays his hand as the smarmy villain and grinds into obnoxiousness. This isn’t vintage Burton—more “Dark Shadows” than “Ed Wood”—and the tone wavers clumsily between seriousness, caricature and outright farce, but “Big Eyes” still remains an entertaining mix of dark comedy and social commentary.