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Big Eyes has a big heart

Perhaps you know of painter Margaret Keane, the one who paints an endless series of people and animals, all with these oversized doe eyes. They’re not quite kitschy but they’re certainly not the Mona Lisa either.
Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz in Big Eyes
Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz in Big Eyes

Perhaps you know of painter Margaret Keane, the one who paints an endless series of people and animals, all with these oversized doe eyes. They’re not quite kitschy but they’re certainly not the Mona Lisa either. You could tell one just by looking at it. Frankly, I think they’re terrible, banal, sappy, saccharine, sentimentalist illustrations. Everyone’s an art critic, right?

Perhaps you also know of Tim Burton, the film director of such momentous cinematic treats as Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice. Many people say that you can tell a Tim Burton movie just by looking at it. He has a peculiar style all his own. Recently, he’s directed banal illustrative bubblegum fantasies (i.e. Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that are still as visually captivating but perhaps a bit kitschy. He loves to take iconic fairy tales and run them through a glossy, morbid mill that cranks out meaningless bits of confection, overly stylized, sappy and immediately disposable. If someone could intentionally create camp, he would never stop working.

Burton also helmed an understated little film called Ed Wood, a biopic of the life of a kitschy, over-earnest film director who had no talent but all the ambition in the world. He has a status in cult films but one look at Burton’s movie about him reveals everything you need to know so you’d never have to watch any of Wood’s own films. Frankly, they’re all terrible. Campy would be overselling them.

And so it makes the most sense that Burton would take that same understated sensibility from that picture to this one, another biopic scribed by Ed Wood’s very same Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. This is a deeply affecting and personal look at Keane and her struggles. The artist who knew how to draw people with big eyes had some serious man troubles, mostly involving her second husband, Walter.

Margaret (played by Amy Adams) was just getting out of one failed marriage when charming San Francisco realtor Walter (Christoph Waltz) waltzed into her life. He was a painter too, but not of the same calibre. He could only create mediocre Parisian street scenes, hardly the sort of thing that would capture a nation’s fascination.

But Walter was charismatic and an opportunist, controlling and manipulative. He knew how to schmooze people and sell things. Though he wasn’t a good painter, he was a world-class artist of bovine excrement: a total shyster. In trying to promote his art, he stumbled onto a way to sell hers, but only by calling it his. For years, he got away with this incredible and rare type of art forgery. First, he did it against her wishes and then he bamboozled her to agree to it, forcing her into artistic slavery.

The incredible ruse lasted for a decade before she escaped him too. An historic trial took place where the judge could only decide on who was telling the truth by having both Margaret and Walter paint a “big eyes” character in front of the entire courtroom. I’m not spoiling anything because it’s all a part of the record books.

Big Eyes is the best Tim Burton movie to come out in years, the last probably being Big Fish from 2003. It’s also one of his most understated and most important as it offers up a real life story of one woman’s perseverance over an abusive husband. This isn’t Selma (the new docudrama about Martin Luther King and the fight to stop racial segregation in the States during the 1960s) but at least it doesn’t have either Helena Bonham Carter or Johnny Depp in it. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are real actors, great actors. He’s won two Oscars and she’s been nominated five times in 10 years. It’s only a matter of time before she has a shelf full of gold.

More importantly, however, it’s a tenderly told tale, a story about suffering and comeuppance with beautifully portrayed performances and high production values, and it’s a movie with the bare minimum of special effects and only to further the plot, not just for razzle-dazzle. In short, this thing is a work of art. Maybe not high art, but it’s still art and that’s saying something for a Tim Burton movie.

Review

Big Eyes<br />Stars: 4.5<br />Starring Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman, Danny Huston, and Terence Stamp<br />Directed by Tim Burton<br />Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski<br />Rated PG for coarse language and tobacco use<br />Runtime: 106 minutes<br />Now playing at Cineplex Odeon North Edmonton and Scotiabank Theatre

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