Susan Granger’s review of “Big Eyes” (The Weinstein Company)
Do you remember those kitschy “big-eyed waif” paintings that were so popular in the early 1960s? They were created by an artist named Keane – and the stranger-than-fiction backstory is fascinating.
Imperious Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) was a master of merchandising, commercializing his enigmatic “little hobo kids.” But he didn’t actually paint them. They were created by his wife Margaret (Amy Adams). As it turns out, the Keanes were living a colossal lie that fooled the entire art world.
After leaving her first abusive husband, Margaret fled with her young daughter Jane to San Francisco, where she was selling her charcoal portraits for a dollar or two at outdoor art fairs. Then she met insistently charming Walter, who told her he studied in Paris, chiding: “You undervalue yourself.”
After they married, fast-talking Walter manipulated his naïve, gullible wife into allowing him to sell her work under his name, claiming they could have never achieve fame and fortune unless she hid the truth that she was the artist.
Insecure and isolated, Margaret eventually left Walter, moving to Honolulu, where Jehovah’s Witnesses encouraged to expose the fraud and enabled her to take Walter to court.
Scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (“Ed Wood”), it’s directed as a serio-comedy by Tim Burton (“Batman,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sweeney Todd”). Burton uses Walter’s megalomaniacal dominance and Margaret’s submissiveness as symptomatic of the gender barriers that were prevalent in that repressive era.
While Amy Adams sensitively captures Margaret’s timidity, reticence and complicity in her own victimization, Christoph Waltz exudes frenzied exuberance and smug persuasiveness.
They’re supported by Danny Huston, as San Francisco Examiner columnist Dick Nolan, and Terence Stamp as New York Times art critic John Canaday, along with Jon Polito, Jason Schwartzmann and James Saito.
FYI: now at age 87, Margaret Keane still churns out those paintings of innocent, sad-eyed children.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Big Eyes” is an intriguing but curiously shallow 7, revealing art as identity theft.
