FILM: ‘Big Eyes’
Tim Burton’s filmmaking is often as polarizing as the artwork that’s the subject of his latest movie; you either love it or you hate it. Fortunately for Burton non-fans, Big Eyes is his least strange movie to date, with the only hint of his trademark surreal weirdness being delivered during a supermarket scene where Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) sees every person sporting the same obscenely oversized peepers as the tykes in her paintings. Oh, and Johnny Depp is nowhere to be found.
Perhaps the reason for the lack of eccentricity is because the Keane paintings themselves are weird enough. If you were around in the late 1950s/early 1960s, you might have encountered the artwork of Walter Keane in the unlikeliest of places: the gas station, the bank, your dentist’s office, or in the aisle of your local five-and-dime store. Keane’s tacky portraits of sad-looking, forlorn children with penetrating, extraterrestrial-sized eyes were plastered across calendars, posters, and postcards during the mid-century, making him famous, a media sensation — and ultimately, filthy rich. Celebrities wanted to meet him to have their own big-eyed image painted. There was just one problem: not a single piece was created by Keane himself, but by his wife, Margaret.
Director Tim Burton takes us on an engaging, retro technicolor trip of the rise and fall of Walter and Margaret Keane’s kitschy empire and doomed marriage in Big Eyes. Told in a straightforward, chronological style, the film opens with Margaret packing up her belongings and speeding away from the house she shares with her first husband to head to San Francisco with her young daughter. Like most women at the time, Margaret is stuck between a rock and a hard place; while women were beginning to infiltrate the workplace by the late ’50s, they hadn’t yet found freedom from social norms, and being a divorced mother was a taboo that people looked down upon. One of those people is a manager at a furniture factory where Margaret practically has to beg for a job painting Humpty Dumpty onto baby cribs.
In her spare time, and to collect spare change, she showcases her work of large eyed children — largely based on her daughter — at the local outdoor art fair and paints customers’ portraits in the same manner for mere quarters. That’s where she meets Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), a real estate agent passing himself off as another aspiring artist, who thinks that Margaret is undervaluing the price of her work. They hit it off, and before long, Walter is wining, dining, and seducing her with tales of his artistic training in Paris. When Margaret’s ex-husband threatens to take advantage of her unwedded status to gain custody of their daughter, Walter plays the hero and proposes after what seems like only weeks of dating. Desperate, but in love, Margaret jumps at the chance and a shotgun wedding and honeymoon soon follow in Hawaii.
Back home, and aspiring to make a name for himself, Walter rents wall space in a local jazz club where he can showcase and hopefully sell his and Margaret’s work. No one is particularly smitten with Walter’s street scenes, but one lady is taken with a doe-eyed child painted by Margaret, which results in a sale. After a nasty altercation between Walter and the jazz club owner, his name and the paintings are splashed across the papers, and the public flocks to the club to see what all the fuss is about over the big eyed portraits. Sales skyrocket. Since Margaret is now a Keane and signs her name as such on the paintings, Walter begins taking credit for the work, reasoning with her that “no one wants to buy lady art.” She’s also socially awkward when chatting with prospective customers — something that the smooth-talking Walter has no problem with.
And so begins one of the biggest lies that the art world has ever conceived. Margaret locks herself away in her studio, churning out paintings like an assembly line. Even her daughter is not allowed to disturb her, as Margaret and Walter wish to keep the charade hidden from her as well. In this pre-Google world, there’s a lot about Walter that Margaret was blissfully unaware of when she married him: he has a daughter by a first marriage, and his street scene paintings were not his work at all, but credited to a person named S. Cenic (he tries to convince Margaret that Scenic was his nickname in France!).
But as deceitful as Walter Keane is, one thing is certain: without him, the world probably would not have discovered Margaret’s work. He couldn’t paint, but he did know how to promote a product and perhaps missed his calling as an advertising and marketing guru. When the public start collecting Keane posters because they can’t afford the paintings in the gallery, Walter is inspired to sell them for 10 cents each and launches the line of reproduction products. It almost seems like a gimmick, these creepy looking pictures, but the public eats them up while art critics and competing gallery owners shake their fists at them. Walter gives a sob story on a talk show about the inspiration behind the paintings’ subjects — supposedly the war torn children of Berlin — and the Keane fame culminates in Margaret completing a wall-sized mural for the 1964 World’s State Fair.
From that point on, the marriage really disintegrates. Walter gets increasingly controlling, angry, and abusive, even flicking lit matches at his wife and stepdaughter which nearly cause Margaret’s studio to go up in flames. Margaret leaves him, files for a divorce, and after revealing to a Hawaiian DJ that she was the artist of the paintings all along, she eventually sues Walter for the rights to them. After Walter makes an outrageous spectacle cross-examining himself as his own attorney, the judge finally declares that a paint-off in the courtroom between him and Margaret will be the only way to determine who is telling the truth. Guess who wins?
As Walter Keane, Waltz gives a commendable — if sometimes borderline hammy — performance. It seems that he had a lot of fun with this role, and definitely draws the most laughs in the movie, whether intentional or not. Waltz resists labeling his less-than-nice characters as villains during interviews, insisting that everyone has darkness inside of them, and prefers to focus on an unsavory character’s positive attributes (which in this case would be Walter’s charisma and ability to get Margaret’s paintings exposed to the public). Other reviews have criticized him for over-the-top acting in this film, but it’s important to note that the real-life Margaret Keane (who is 87 and still painting) told People magazine that watching Waltz “was like I was seeing (Walter) again.”
As SS Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds — a role that won him his first Oscar and launched his Hollywood career — part of what made his character so scary and unsettling to audiences is that we were often wondering what madness this man was capable of beneath the charming, well mannered public persona. As Walter Keane, that madness is allowed to bubble to the surface. The real-life Keane was said to be larger than life, especially during the actual divorce trial. As depicted in the film, Walter’s courtroom testimony is so absurd you can’t help but laugh, and if he weren’t such a pathetic liar, we’d almost feel sorry for him. There’s a sadness — not without some irony given the subject matter of the paintings — that’s felt from both Walter and Margaret as the Keane name gains notoriety; Margaret’s is obvious due to the guilt weighing her down, but Walter’s is more concealed. Waltz is 5’7″, and I wondered if it was Burton’s intention to choose male actors who tower over him during many scenes, making us see Walter as a figuratively small man. Waltz’s Austrian/German accent also remains intact, but oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to work against the character, who wishes to depict himself to Margaret as a cultured world traveler.
As for Adams, who seems to be the reigning America’s Sweetheart of the silver screen, she doesn’t have as much juicy material to work with. At times, one wants to shout at Margaret to stop being so meek and naive, but we do witness her arc from being a repressed wife to a woman who finds her voice and the courage to speak the truth about her paintings and finally get her just desserts. Part of that metamorphous is due to a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to visit her Hawaiian home after her divorce.
Filling the supporting cast are Krysten Ritter as Margaret’s friend DeeAnn (who is big-eyed herself), Jason Schwartzman as Ruben, who owns a competing art gallery across the street from the Keane gallery, Danny Huston as a reporter covering the saga, and Terence Stamp as a very vocal art critic who despises Keane’s work and knows how to push Walter’s buttons.
Visually, Big Eyes is a stunning movie, drenched with all of the glorious colors of the mid-century period. Everything from the costume design to the settings to even the food packaging stacked on the aisles in the supermarket scene just pops in keeping with the period in history. And the A-frame California abode that the Keanes move into once they become famous is a retro-home-lover’s dream. I would recommend seeing this film in the theater if you can to properly soak all of it up.
Admittedly, the one small criticism I have about Big Eyes is that the story is rather simplistic and the entire plot was revealed months before the movie came out (hence the unavoidable spoilers in this review). Burton succeeds in stretching it far enough to make it work as an enjoyable big screen release, but it’s the type of tale that might translate slightly better as a network cable film. A very grown-up movie from Burton, no doubt it is also piquing the public’s interest in Margaret Keane’s work all over again, this time with her now receiving the proper credit. In the end, the artist triumphed over the con artist.
