Chris Knipp
12-31-2014, 03:26 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/Be1.jpg
CHRISTOPH WALTZ AND AMY ADAMS IN BIG EYES
Not macabre, just yucky
Tim Burton is "known for his dark, Gothic, macabre, and quirky horror and fantasy films," his Wikibio says. Well, he should stick to them. Big Eyes is not in any of those categories. It's the story of the woman in San Francisco who painted sickening images of sad children with big round eyes and her smarmy, exploitative husband, who, when the work became famous, pretended it was his and not his wife's, reaping all the praise, publicity, and dollars. Occasionally this movie has Burton's touch, but it's a failed project. There is a confused fascination with the tasteless and the maudlin that's never worked out, and the story isn't even very interesting.
As Armond White points out (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395023/high-art-and-low-mr-turner-and-big-eyes-armond-white/page/0/1), the primary failure of Big Eyes is its lack of penetration into the mind and emotions of Margaret Keane. Where did her kitsch images come from, what did they mean to her, why did she keep repeating them? Unlike in his Ed Wood, an understanding portrait of a failed and mistaken but quirkily appealing artist -- a filmmaker -- also scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, here Burton marshalls no real sympathy.
The actress doesn't help us. Played by Amy Adams in a blond wig that makes her unrecognizable, the painter Margaret Keane is a blank. She is merely a passive Fifties female whose images appeal to the naive and the tasteless, a woman pushed to the limit before she finally cries uncle and takes her boorish ex-husband to court. But the movie never penetrates below this surface to the person and the imagination or the sensibility beneath.
Big Eyes also suffers from the casting of Christoph Waltz for the other principal role as Margaret Keane's husband, Walter. Waltz excelled as the lip-smackingly villainous Nazi officer in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but is a washout in this kind of role. He's a smarmy creep from the start. We don't believe his good humor or perceive his charm. His lies -- like claiming to have lived in Paris to justify his out-of-date pseudo-Utrillo daubs -- are superficial and uninteresting.
What we needed was James Mason. I'm thinking of the sublime strangeness of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, or the attractive monster with refined European manners in Kubrick's Lolita. And while we're at it, how about casting Shelley Winters as Mrs. Keane? To make this story interesting, we need it to be a real romance, with a long, slow disenchantment. With a Kubrick or Nick Ray treatment, Burton's cartoonish couple would acquire haunting depth.
Ed Wood notwithstanding, Tim Burton is more than anything a master of artifice and cinematic gadgetry, fake noses, tall hats, Edward Scissorhands' scissor-hands. It is hard to see what he saw in Keane's paintings other than the fact that they are creepy. If this is what he thinks, he should delve into their creepiness more. He only sees them, superficially, as ridiculous, or pop-ironic proofs that in contemporary culture anything popular is hailed, as Warhol did Keane's kids, as "great." But this treatment is superficial, Meanwhile, domestic drama is not up Burton's alley. He's good at fairy tales: with feminism he's out of his depth. It's been said that the best sequence of Big Eyes is the final one where the judge puts painting supplies in front of husband and wife in the courtroom to see which of the two of them can really produce the "Keane" children. But even this is flat. It's more about what doesn't happen: Walter Keane can't produce a painting, because of course he never knew how to do the little round-eyed runts. Only his wife did.
Other actors are uninteresting or ill-used; so are their characters. As Dick Nolan, the San Francisco columnist who first gave the Keane paintings publicity, Danny Huston has nothing particular to do; it's just exposition. Duded up as Ruben, the slick gallery owner who rejects the kitsch paintings and is disgusted at their commercial success, Jason Schwartzman is almost completely wasted. These two characters exist only to express the movie's shallow cynicism.
All in all, Tim Burton's Big Eyes is painting by-the-numbers.
Big Eyes,105 mins., was released in the US on Christmas Day 2014; UK, 26 Dec.; other countries Jan.-April 2015.
CHRISTOPH WALTZ AND AMY ADAMS IN BIG EYES
Not macabre, just yucky
Tim Burton is "known for his dark, Gothic, macabre, and quirky horror and fantasy films," his Wikibio says. Well, he should stick to them. Big Eyes is not in any of those categories. It's the story of the woman in San Francisco who painted sickening images of sad children with big round eyes and her smarmy, exploitative husband, who, when the work became famous, pretended it was his and not his wife's, reaping all the praise, publicity, and dollars. Occasionally this movie has Burton's touch, but it's a failed project. There is a confused fascination with the tasteless and the maudlin that's never worked out, and the story isn't even very interesting.
As Armond White points out (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395023/high-art-and-low-mr-turner-and-big-eyes-armond-white/page/0/1), the primary failure of Big Eyes is its lack of penetration into the mind and emotions of Margaret Keane. Where did her kitsch images come from, what did they mean to her, why did she keep repeating them? Unlike in his Ed Wood, an understanding portrait of a failed and mistaken but quirkily appealing artist -- a filmmaker -- also scripted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, here Burton marshalls no real sympathy.
The actress doesn't help us. Played by Amy Adams in a blond wig that makes her unrecognizable, the painter Margaret Keane is a blank. She is merely a passive Fifties female whose images appeal to the naive and the tasteless, a woman pushed to the limit before she finally cries uncle and takes her boorish ex-husband to court. But the movie never penetrates below this surface to the person and the imagination or the sensibility beneath.
Big Eyes also suffers from the casting of Christoph Waltz for the other principal role as Margaret Keane's husband, Walter. Waltz excelled as the lip-smackingly villainous Nazi officer in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but is a washout in this kind of role. He's a smarmy creep from the start. We don't believe his good humor or perceive his charm. His lies -- like claiming to have lived in Paris to justify his out-of-date pseudo-Utrillo daubs -- are superficial and uninteresting.
What we needed was James Mason. I'm thinking of the sublime strangeness of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, or the attractive monster with refined European manners in Kubrick's Lolita. And while we're at it, how about casting Shelley Winters as Mrs. Keane? To make this story interesting, we need it to be a real romance, with a long, slow disenchantment. With a Kubrick or Nick Ray treatment, Burton's cartoonish couple would acquire haunting depth.
Ed Wood notwithstanding, Tim Burton is more than anything a master of artifice and cinematic gadgetry, fake noses, tall hats, Edward Scissorhands' scissor-hands. It is hard to see what he saw in Keane's paintings other than the fact that they are creepy. If this is what he thinks, he should delve into their creepiness more. He only sees them, superficially, as ridiculous, or pop-ironic proofs that in contemporary culture anything popular is hailed, as Warhol did Keane's kids, as "great." But this treatment is superficial, Meanwhile, domestic drama is not up Burton's alley. He's good at fairy tales: with feminism he's out of his depth. It's been said that the best sequence of Big Eyes is the final one where the judge puts painting supplies in front of husband and wife in the courtroom to see which of the two of them can really produce the "Keane" children. But even this is flat. It's more about what doesn't happen: Walter Keane can't produce a painting, because of course he never knew how to do the little round-eyed runts. Only his wife did.
Other actors are uninteresting or ill-used; so are their characters. As Dick Nolan, the San Francisco columnist who first gave the Keane paintings publicity, Danny Huston has nothing particular to do; it's just exposition. Duded up as Ruben, the slick gallery owner who rejects the kitsch paintings and is disgusted at their commercial success, Jason Schwartzman is almost completely wasted. These two characters exist only to express the movie's shallow cynicism.
All in all, Tim Burton's Big Eyes is painting by-the-numbers.
Big Eyes,105 mins., was released in the US on Christmas Day 2014; UK, 26 Dec.; other countries Jan.-April 2015.