Big Eyes – written and directed by Tim Burton. BioDrama. 105 minutes Color 2014
★
The Story: A painter marries a man who claims all her paintings are by himself.
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A lousy director is made worse when he writes his own movie. For he is hardly in a position to proclaim in a voice loud and clear that such and such is missing and such and such ought to be. I don’t come to this movie claiming that Tim Burton is a lousy director, but only that his aesthetic is low. Low, suggesting that it might be perfect for a treatment of the provenance of the Keane paintings.
Vulgarity, particularly Hollywood vulgarity, can have great energy and zest. Or vulgarity can be empty. Or, even worse, it can borrow an energy from a source not proper to its subject. The expression of energy not belonging to the subject is called sentimentality. Thus the Keane big eyes into which has been injected, like heroin, the lure of an unearned pathos. It is a pathos striking on first sight. On second sight it is repulsive.
However, in me, Big Eyes, the film, produces not revulsion but inertia. On the one hand the film is a BioDrama, probably the most fragile of all film genres, particularly when so much of the subject is known that imagination of execution can take no hold. In art facts kill all.
On the other, we are also witnessing people who are not fighting over the provenance of a Rubens, but schlock. This is not Monument Men. One cannot mourn here for the unkindly orphanage of masterpieces. The child whose custody the parents battle is already dead. The person who painted the Bi Eyes is a pick-pocket of our pathos. The pathos doesn’t belong to her any more than the color of her peroxide hair does.
Finally, the part of Margaret is underwritten and mis-played by Amy Adams. She chooses to play Margaret Keane as mealy-mouthed and nothing else. It won’t do. There was a passion in Margaret Keane which is intense, constant, and ruthless, and we never see it. Oh, we see it well enough as regards her daughter, whom she rescues twice from husbands worse than death. But Margaret Keane was also a passionate painter and she was also a passionate promoter of her painting. These are kept hidden by the writer-director. We never see her own big eyes as she makes the paintings. And we never see her gather her forces to hawk them. Instead, the part exists only in relation to her husband who was so bent on the fantasy of being an artist that he claimed he himself had painted her pictures. Adams plays it as a milksop to him. We never see her calculation and inner collusion in this. Her greed, her cunning. She was a peroxide blonde, right down to her marrow.
The real story of the Keane paintings is a story of two great selfishnesses, two great passions in conflict – that is the story that is not on screen. We see Walter Keane’s passion but never Margaret’s. It’s not in the writing, it’s not in the direction, it’s not in the playing of Adams. We almost think it might be there because of the playing of Christoph Waltz, who seizes the part of Walter in his jaws and shakes it fit to kill. He displays the fanatical charm and belligerent drive of the pitchman. He gives us a smile that would fell an ox. He consumes the screen. His attack on the role is Lisztian. He is at concert pitch. The film is his.
Although – does it really seem necessary to launch Godzilla to trounce Casper Milquetoast, a brontosaurus a bug? Two pick-pockets, each trying to o’er-balance the other? Each meager?