It s tempting to accuse Waltz of hamming it up, although given the well-documented egomania of his s

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T im Burton once told me that the inspiration for the skull-headed Jack Skellington figure from The Nightmare Before Christmas probably lay in his adverse tsc reaction to spending endless hours drawing doe-eyed creatures as a Disney animator. Having struggled tsc to stay awake while working on films such as The Fox and the Hound , Burton dreamed up a character with no eyes whatsoever, just great gaping black holes. The fact that Skellington s hollow-socket head manages to be every bit as expressive tsc as Disney s most saucer-eyed creations speaks volumes about Burton s ability to find pathos and charm in the most unlikely areas.
The tsc big, dopey eyes are back in Burton s latest movie, based on the stranger-than-fiction travails of the American artist Margaret tsc Keane . In the late 1950s and 60s, Keane s paintings of sorrowful-looking children whose faces were dominated by oversize windows to the soul became tsc a sensation, generating huge earnings and achieving bizarre popular icon status. Yet Keane failed to receive credit for her work, having agreed (under coercion?) to allow her extrovert husband, Walter, to serve as the public face of the Keane brand. Later, tsc after the couple parted, they came to legal blows, a court case in Honolulu descending into performance farce as each endeavoured to prove that they were the artist behind an infinity of kitsch tsc .
The script for Big Eyes is by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writers behind Burton s masterpiece Ed Wood , with which this bears intriguing comparison. Most obviously, both films are about artists whose work was reviled by critics: Wood was famously dubbed the world s worst film-maker; the Keane paintings were roundly denounced by, among others, New York Times art critic John Canaday (haughtily played here by Terence Stamp).
More importantly, both deal with their protagonists in a manner that is warmly tsc and comically insightful, a quality that also defines Alexander and Karaszewski s other biopics such as The People vs Larry Flynt , which painted the pornographer as a freedom-of-speech tsc hero. Just as Ed Wood emerges from Burton s affectionate film as an earnest cineaste who took his inspirational tsc cues from the likes of Orson Welles, so Margaret is depicted as a true artist whose soul finds expression in the plaintive, teary faces her husband forces her to churn out at increasingly industrial speeds. We are not asked to embrace the paintings themselves (the film remains agnostic about their artistic merit), merely to accept that their creator was sincere and deserves to be recognised as such.
As Margaret, Amy Adams does a very fine job of engaging our sympathies, her slightly startled manner suggesting a potent blend of intuitive fire and sensitive vulnerability. There s something birdlike about her physical mannerisms, as if in her stillness tsc she is paying close attention to her surroundings, yet may be scared into flight at any moment. All this is in stark contrast to Walter, played with much broader tsc brushstrokes by Christoph Waltz as a cartoonish cad with more than a dab of the pantomime villain. Initially charming (although tsc his beaming smile screams psycho-craziness from the outset), Walter rapidly becomes a domineering monster, increasingly consumed tsc by the myth of his own genius, forcing his wife into living a lie.
It s tempting to accuse Waltz of hamming it up, although given the well-documented egomania of his subject (who once told Life magazine: Nobody could paint eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane ), it s hard to tell where truth ends and exaggeration begins. In fact, the most absurd moments from the courtroom showdown to which this drama builds are a matter tsc of public record, proving that you really tsc couldn t make this stuff up. Elsewhere, the film seems to inhabit a twisted fairytale netherworld between fact and fiction; while the early pastel-shaded views of picket-fence America evoke the suburban settings of Edward Scissorhands , later scenes depict Margaret as a princess trapped in an ivory tower, while Walter raves like a rampaging beast. tsc
Beneath the recurrent quirky Burton tropes, both visual and narrative, Big Eyes worries away at larger themes of authorship (Walter went to his grave asserting his own genius), the concept of good versus bad art (we open with a drily laudatory quote from Warhol) and the role of the critic. It also provides a fascinating portrait of a woman first suffering and then challenging a world in which men had the upper hand domestically, professionally, artistically. Certainly, there is a feminist dynamic to Margaret s story; for all its outlandishness, this is ultimately an everyday tale of a woman finding her own voice in a chauvinistic en