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BIG EYES Send This Review to a Friend
Remember all of those paintings and reproductions of kids with huge eyes that stare at you? For a time during the late 1950s and 1960s they were quite the rage, but there turned out to be a nasty husband and wife story behind them. “Big Eyes,” directed by Tim Burton, stars Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as the couple. The paintings were signed Keane, the name of the husband, Walter Keane. Later. his wife Margaret charged that she was the one who really was the artist, even though her egotistical and promotion-minded husband took the credit.
Burton , working from a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewsi, spins a fascinating tale of artistic corruption and Margaret’s going along with it until she couldn’t take the indignity anymore. Amy Adams, an actress of extraordinary versatility and skill, does a fine job of portraying Margaret through the course of her compliance to herself-asserting awakening.
One detriment to the film is the obnoxiously hammy performance by Waltz. He is so far over the top that it seems as if he may burst out of the screen and into the audience at any moment. When he begins to unravel under the heat of exposure, his lack of acting credibility mounts.
But there is always Adams, plus the skill of Burton in telling the tale, apart from his letting Waltz run wild. As for those bug-eyed, staring youngsters, people can argue all over again as to whether it was art or junk. Selling reproductions in various forms became an industry. In a one scene the then art critic John Canaday of the New York Times, as played by Terence Stamp, vents his anger over the paintings that he regards as “hack work.”
As a result of a legal action there is dramatic confrontation, with the judge ordering a painting face-off to prove who really painted the Keanes. At the end of the film we are shown a shot of the real Margaret Keane, and that lends the film a final note of authenticity. A Weinstein Company release. Reviewed December 25, 2014.
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