Big Eyes
Tim Burton (2014)
Portraits of children with disproportionately large, round eyes, signed ‘Keane’, were mass produced and became a huge money-spinner in America during the 1950s and early 1960s. Walter Keane, as well as masterminding this commercial enterprise, claimed the paintings as his own work; in fact, they were all created by his wife, Margaret. The fraud – although it was never admitted by Walter – was exposed after the couple divorced: Margaret publicly announced that she was the artist and sued her husband for slander (sic). The court hearing culminated in the judge’s directing Walter and Margaret each to create a big-eyed drawing on the spot. The Keanes’ partnership – matrimonial and ‘artistic’ – sounds promising material for a drama but Tim Burton’s Big Eyes is disappointing. The director’s tone is uncertain (Danny Elfman’s score reflects that uncertainty); the script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski is weak; and Christoph Waltz’s Walter is very wrong. The good ended happily, and the bad happily – this is what real life means, in this case. At the close of the film, legends on the screen explain that Walter Keane died in 2000, ‘penniless and embittered’’; and that Margaret ‘found happiness’ in a new marriage (her third) and, now in her late eighties, still paints every day. The latter legend is accompanied by a photograph of the real Margaret with Amy Adams, who plays her in the film. This increasingly various actress is likeable and sensitive but the photograph, dominated by the broadly-smiling older woman, crystallises one’s suspicion that Adams’s characterisation is constrained by her respect for Margaret Keane.
The voiceover narration of Big Eyes is supplied by a character called Dick Nolan (Danny Huston) who also appears intermittently. Nolan is a journalist in San Francisco, where much of the film’s action takes place. At the start, he summarises the lack of recognition of female artists (Georgia O’Keeffe, as Margaret reminds Walter at one point, was a notable exception) and hints at the larger subservience of women in the 1950s. (I was puzzled as to why the film-makers shifted events back by a few years. In reality, Walter Keane met Margaret Ulbrich in 1953 and their ten-year marriage ended in 1964. The film starts in 1958, when Margaret leaves her first husband and moves, with her young daughter Jane, to San Francisco, where she meets Walter.) Margaret Keane is presented by Tim Burton as an example, albeit an extraordinary and extreme example, of a woman of her time who was exploited by her husband. Amy Adams speaks most of her lines quietly – although she’s audible (and although the real Margaret may be softly spoken too), this seems an almost literal expression of Margaret’s artistic voice not being heard. Burton appears to think that, because Walter is an egomaniacal fraud, the wronged Margaret must be contrastingly intelligent and tasteful, and this is what Adams conveys. She has a lovely delicacy and vulnerability. She’s less convincing as a woman who, as the film also makes clear, was a keen numerologist and whose life was turned around – and whose fortunes improved – once she became a Jehovah’s Witness.
This de-emphasising of the less discriminating side of Margaret Keane’s personality links to Tim Burton’s skirting round the kitschiness of her work – this too is unhelpful to Amy Adams. Burton, according to Wikipedia, is a collector of Keane artwork; it’s no surprise that he doesn’t wish to write her off as an artist any more than he wanted, in Ed Wood (1994), to pander to the received wisdom that the title character was the worst film director of all time. Burton concentrates on Walter Keane’s egregious exploitation of his wife and, not unreasonably, takes the view that it hardly matters whether Walter was appropriating base metal or pure gold: her husband, through his own, vain ambition, denied Margaret a great deal of money and celebrity of her own. But the script nevertheless hints that she believes passionately in her work and is therefore doubly frustrated – by her husband’s theft of it and the critical establishment’s contempt for it. There’s just one moment when Amy Adams is able to get something of this across: at a posh reception, Walter confronts the severely scornful critic John Canaday (amusingly played by Terence Stamp), and is humiliated. You feel both Margaret’s schadenfreude at the tongue-lashing Walter receives and her irritation with Canaday, and that she can’t herself take him on. When Margaret eventually claims the work as hers, there’s a montage of reactions from other, minor characters in the story, including a San Francisco gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman), who mutters, ‘But who’d want to claim responsibility for this stuff?’ It’s striking that Big Eyes, although categorised on both IMDB and Wikipedia as a ‘biographical drama’, has earned its stars Golden Globe nominations for performance in a comedy or musical. Would that be the case if Margaret Keane’s output were not still regarded as a laughing matter?
Directors will surely think twice, after this film, before again casting Christoph Waltz as an American. After Waltz’s impressive performance as the Nazi officer Landa in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino shrewdly wrote for him, in Django Unchained, the part of a German immigrant in America. As Dr King Schultz, Waltz was even better than in his previous outing for Tarantino; in the meantime, however, he’d been charmless and awkward as a New York lawyer in Polanski’s Carnage. Waltz is more exuberant but no more charming as Walter Keane. He’s creepy from the start – it’s hard to see what attracts Margaret to Walter (and she is attracted to him – even before he proposes marriage as a means of ensuring that she’ll retain custody of her daughter, which Margaret’s first husband threatens to contest). Waltz isn’t remotely convincing as the Midwestern realtor Walter is meant to be. It’s not only a problem of accent – although this is never convincing, even to these English ears, and tends to disappear somewhere in the mid-Atlantic whenever Walter gets angry. Waltz also has a strong sardonic streak which he evidently finds hard to suppress: he lacks the wholehearted insincerity that one associates with American hucksters. In the climactic courtroom sequence (which fizzles out: Burton appears to realise that and ends it abruptly), Margaret acknowledges that Walter is a charmer and a genius at PR. As Christoph Waltz plays him, Walter is not even that – he’s an obvious, slimily ingratiating fraud who would fool no one. Margaret’s daughter Jane, the original model for her mother’s work, is played, as a young girl, by Delaney Raye (who’s particularly good) and, as a teenager, by Madeleine Arthur. As Jane ages, her eyes seem to get bigger.
31 December 2014