Review: Big Eyes

Once upon a time, there was the strange case of Margaret Keane, whose paintings of saucer-eyes waifs were passed off by her husband Walter as his own. She spent hours and hours and hours in her studio, churning out painting after painting whilst her husband counted their growing fortune.

Tim Burton's wildly uneven stab at a "woman's picture" begins in the soft pastels of North California in 1958. Margaret (Amy Adams) has walked out on her first husband and started her new life as a single mother in North Beach, San Francisco. She meets Walter (Christoph Waltz) at an outdoor art fair - he praises her talent ("You undervalue yourself."), she's impressed with his tales of living in Paris, where he studied art and painted on the Left Bank. They have a whirlwind courtship, though the film makes it clear that the marriage for Margaret is a source of security and a way to keep her ex-husband from gaining custody of their daughter.

Walter is a first-class hustler, relentlessly shopping his Parisian street scenes and her sad-eyed children around the city, eventually convincing Enrico Banducci (Jon Polito) to display them in his popular the hungry i nightclub. When one of the customers mistake Margaret's work, simply signed "Keane," as his, Walter lets the mistake pass especially when the customer's husband purchases the painting on the spot. That little white lie is soon seen as the gospel truth as the paintings become more and more popular.

Margaret is disturbed by the fraud but, recognising her meekness and Walter's talent for salesmanship, goes along with it. "I'm Keane, you're Keane. From now on, we're one and the same," he says, but the underlying threat of those words soon turn Margaret into a hostage of her own making. It's understandable that she falters during a pivotal moment when she could have claimed ownership; it's no less believable that she maintains the charade as her work is bought by both the general public (Walter had the clever idea to sell prints, posters, and postcards of her work, an uncommon practice at the time) and the cultural, social, and political glitterati. Even if she did reveal the truth, could she make it on her own given the male dominance and female marginalisation of the time? Chances seem slim when even a priest advises, "Man is the head of the household. Perhaps you should trust his judgment."

Big Eyes possesses Burton's directorial stamp, arguably more subdued here than in his previous works. The production is unsurprisingly accomplished with special kudos to Bruno Delbonnel's expert modulation of his colour palette, a particular asset considering the film's sharp tonal shifts. Sometimes a dark fairy tale, sometimes a Fifties domestic melodrama, sometimes a Hitchcock film, sometimes a warped remake of Mildred Pierce (is it mere coincidence that Joan Crawford, the star of that maternal noir, is briefly shown in Big Eyes?), it's so all over the place that one wonders if Burton had a clear, abiding vision for his film.

Adams and Waltz are individually exceptional though they often cancel each other out in their scenes together. The fragility of her performance renders his flim flammer extraordinaire hammy and cartoonish, whilst his exuberance shrivels the subtlety of her soft-spoken artist.

Big Eyes

Directed by: Tim Burton

Written by: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Starring: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Danny Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Terence Stamp, Jon Polito, Delaney Raye, Madeleine Arthur