Big Eyes
What a holiday miracle it would have been to report that Tim Burton’s latest movie was not another who-asked-for-this signpost on the dirt road to irrelevance, that his reunion with Ed Wood screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski instead had resulted in another fruitful and darkly funny biopsy of mid-20th-century kitsch.
Nope.
The dim, semi-anonymous Big Eyes stars Amy Adams as still-living (and visible here) painter Margaret Keane, the artist whose signature style involved putting wide, dairy-cow eyes on hungry-looking children. In the movie’s telling, Margaret is a naïve divorcée and mother who mortgages her name and reputation to Walter Keane, whom Christoph Waltz plays as a loudly transparent huckster from the start. Assuming even a modicum of veracity in Alexander and Karaszewski’s script, we’re witnessing a marriage of deep emotional abuses, not a mirthful battle of the sexes.
What Big Eyes oddly resembles is a super-white gloss on the Tina Turner story told in 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With It. Of course, instead of “River Deep, Mountain High,” made in a marathon, sweat-soaked recording session as Ike Turner threatens in the background, Burton’s story reaches its big moment with a giant shitty painting made for the United Nations. And instead of Buddhism helping to heal Tina Turner, Margaret is rescued by some friendly, litigious Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In the background, much good art direction and production design go to waste as our sympathies are mustered for the bad artist to defeat the bad person. Terence Stamp thunders amusingly as an art critic for a couple of minutes, but his character’s message is for naught. For all Burton has to say here about the cultural collective consciousness or the soul of the striving hack, he may as well have conceived the story of Family Circus creator Bil Keane.
