Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz star in Big Eyes, which is based on the life of artist Margaret Ulbrich.Leah Gallo
My, what big (and crooked) teeth Christoph Waltz has in Big Eyes – the better, it seems, to smarm and leer and gnash and just generally eat the scenery in Tim Burton's latest! And what blond hair Amy Adams has – the better, it seems, to amplify the Rumpelstiltskin-inflected echos of a story of a fair, naive damsel, trapped in an attic studio, who must forever crank out kitschy paintings of forlorn-looking children that her cruel husband then takes down to a waiting world to turn into gold! And my, what a disappointment Big Eyes is!
On paper, it looks like Oscar-bait par excellence. There's Burton, he of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman fame. There are Adams and Waltz, she with five Academy Award nominations, he with two Academy Award wins. There's a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whose credits include Burton's Ed Wood and Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt. And we have, as executive producers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the Brothers Grimm of Hollywood, long-time adepts at spinning tall tales into both box-office and Oscar gold.
Alas, onscreen, Big Eyes is much less than the sum of its glittery parts. Certainly the story has potential, a ripeness seemingly ready-made for the high-spirited, stylized, splendour-in-the-trash treatment Burton brought 20 years ago to Ed Wood. Like that movie, it's "based on true events," in this instance the life of Margaret Ulbrich (Adams) who, at movie's start in 1958, we find fleeing her suburban Northern California home and unseen abusive husband, for a new life in San Francisco's boho North Beach. Intones Danny Huston in voice over: "All she had was the paintings in her trunk and her daughter in the back seat."
Trained at a Memphis art school, Margaret eventually starts to show her wares at an outdoor art fair. There she falls under the spell of seeming fellow artist Walter Keane (Waltz) who, claiming he studied at Paris's École des Beaux-Arts in the late 1940s, is trying to "walk away from the bourgeois scene" by selling paintings of Montmartre street scenes. Keane has "wolf" written all over his flashing incisors. But he's thick with the charm and the compliments, especially for Margaret's odd but sincerely rendered portraits of waifs with Goth-like eyes the size of pancakes. Plus, for all his desire to make a living as an artist, he's making good coin as a commercial real estate agent. Insecure, at poverty's door, a single mom desperate to keep her daughter out of the clutches of her first husband, Margaret soon finds herself marrying Walter and honeymooning in Hawaii.
Back in San Francisco, the ever-hustling Walter works hard to sell both his paintings and Margaret's, which she now is signing "Keane." The enterprise seems doomed until Walter catches a lucky break by persuading the owner of the popular hungry i jazz-and-folk club to let him hang their paintings there, albeit in the hallway to the washrooms. It's Margaret's work, however, not Walter's, that catches the patrons' eyes. And when the Italian tycoon Dino Olivetti, on the cusp of buying one of Margaret's big-eyed acrylics, asks Walter, "Who is the artist?" A long pause ensues before Walter finally, fatefully answers: "I am."
Margaret, of course, is aghast. Walter tries to explain it away as somehow necessary to their success: "People don't buy lady art," he declares. But as sales increase and Walter parlays his wife's voluminous output into a profitable line of postcards, posters, greeting cards and commissions, the fabrication tightens, with Margaret's art becoming less about self-expression and creativity than collusion with self-abnegation and her own oppression. At one point, Burton has a dazed, distressed Margaret wander a grocery store where all the customers and staff, eyes as big as those in a Keane painting, stare at her in unblinking judgment.
Making matters worse is Huston who, as Dick Nolan, gadabout columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, spins one yarn after another about the unlikely, ever-swelling success of Walter Keane, painter. "If you tell anyone," Walter warns Margaret, "this empire collapses."
The empire does collapse, of course, with Burton as its scene-by-scene witness, culminating in an amusing recreation of a courthouse paint-off between Margaret, now an emboldened Jehovah's Witness, and an increasingly exposed Walter now at the end of charm's rope.
Climax aside, Big Eyes is more about hitting plot points than building dramatic momentum. Unable to commit to the pulp-fuelled antics that sparked Ed Wood or downshift into a darker, more nuanced exploration of male-female power relations and spousal abuse, Burton lets his film putter along in middle gear, provoking neither riotous laughter nor emotional immersion. As if to compensate for this failing, Burton gives near free rein to the music of Danny Elfman. Always a composer best appreciated in small doses, Elfman is an irritatingly ubiquitous presence here, striving mightily to, variously, heighten, sweeten or ram home whatever a moment calls for.
Adams is fine as Margaret, even though the role as written is very surfacey, without the complexity she was able to dig into in American Hustle and The Master. Waltz, for his part, is a character – with all the good and bad implied by that: If Burton ever decides to try his hand at Little Red Riding Hood, Waltz should be the first (and only) to hear his director's wolf whistle. That both performers recently scored Golden Globe nominations for Big Eyes has more to do with services previously rendered and, as my colleague Johanna Schneller notes, the hope that at least the beauteous Adams will show at next month's awards fete. Truthfully, the best performance in the film is one of the smallest; it's courtesy of 76-year-old Terence Stamp playing John Canaday, the imperious art critic for The New York Times. When he contemptuously tells a fork-wielding Waltz that "his" art is "synthetic hackery, an infinity of kitsch," it's probably the most electric and truthful moment in the film.
Big Eyes opens on Christmas Day.