BIG EYES
DIRECTOR: Tim Burton
CAST: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schartzmann, Terence Stamp and Danny Huston
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG DLV
RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes
RATING: ****
BRIGHT yet disturbing, Big Eyes is both an indicator of just how far women have come in the past 60 years and a comment on the commercialisation of pop culture.
Though this is the story of an artist and her fight to be recognised as the originator of her own work, it is also a sketch of what life was like for American women in the 1950s and 1960s.
The film starts with Margaret Ulbricht (Adams) leaving her first husband with her young daughter Jane (Delaney Raye) in tow at a time when divorce was just not the done deal. She quickly and thankfully succumbs to the charms of Walter Keane (Waltz) and marries him because he can provide for their family.
He even more quickly persuades her that no one wants “lady art” so she should keep on painting, but he would sell the works under his name. Before you can say ‘pop art’, he gains fame for the pictures of the children with the big eyes and quickly capitalises on their popularity. Keane and his business nose changed the way people accessed popular art by churning out prints and postcards and putting the waifs on anything that could take a picture.
The film is framed and narrated by a journalist who wrote columns about the Keanes and also asked questions about whether popularity equalled artistic merit or quality and just who gets to decide what is art anyway.
Not since Ratatouille’s Anton Ego has an art critic had so much fun in so few lines as John Canaday (Stamp) and Jason Schwarzmann has even greater fun rolling his eyes at the upstart Walter Keane daring to start a gallery to sell pop art.
While the narrative quickly reaches outrageous proportions – how could Margaret go along with this scheme and the lengths Walter goes to to keep up the facade? – this is by far one of the most subtle and intimate of Tim Burton’s movies.
The very look of the Keane paintings is evocative of the landscapes that Burton so often creates in his films and we get candy coloured images of Beat-era San Francisco while a honeymoon in Hawaii is turned into Technicolour postcards.
Even when Margaret starts imagining people in a supermarket all displaying the big eyes of her work, the film never becomes goofy, concentrating on the people rather than the landscapes they move through.
Adams gives a subtle performance. We see the Margaret character’s gradual awakening as artist and person. She credibly goes from shy, attention-starved housewife to assured artist and confident woman taking charge of her own life.
Waltz is creepily charming as the genius of commerce, if not exactly artist of note, Walter Keane. He too is a facet of a huge theme of the film; the idea that anyone with the least bit of artistic bent will find a way to express themselves creatively, in some way or other.
While the ending is anti-climactic when compared to the process the characters took to get there – we’re talking sturm und drang, people setting things on fire, lies and more lies – it is still a deviously fascinating film.
Like Margaret’s art, it is disturbing yet bright on the surface, but the more you talk about it the more you realise there is something going on behind those eyes.
If you liked Frida or The King’s Speech, you will like this.