Big Eyes can't master its own tone

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      Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Rated PG

      For years, the name Walter Keane was associated with the garish kitsch found on the most commercial end of American painting: those tacky portraits of weepy waifs with grossly oversized orbs. In Sleeper’s dystopian future, Woody Allen is shocked to discover that Keanes are valued above Picassos. In Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s look back at the 1950s and early ’60s, these paintings are known to be the hideous brainchildren of one Margaret Hawkins (Amy Adams), late of Nashville, already seen fleeing the suburbs and an oppressive spouse before washing up in San Francisco’s North Beach at the apex of its beatnik splendour.

      Born impresario Keane (Christoph Waltz) soon latches on to her, and next thing you know, they’re married and he’s selling her paintings off the brick walls of the hungry i while Cal Tjader’s Latin jazz burbles in the background. It takes Margaret months to realize he’s taking credit for her work, a decade to say anything about it, and a quarter century to go to court.

      Because “people don’t buy lady art,” as Margaret herself declares, she long remains complicit, and kept in seclusion like a prized painting machine. She lies to the press, friends, and even her daughter, played affectingly as an adolescent by large-eyed Madeleine Arthur (of Vancouver, where much of this was filmed). According to the real Margaret, now 87, Walter was “even nuttier” than Waltz’s portrayal suggests. But in fact the Austrian actor, playing a hustler from Nebraska, bullies this disappointing movie much as his character does hers.

      Mostly avoiding the gleeful grotesquery of his previous work, Burton appears satisfied to entertain us with the crude contrast between Waltz’s showboating and Adams’s fretful passivity. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who went historical for Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt, seem ready to put this dynamic down to gender conformities of the Eisenhower era. They show little interest in interrogating the personal aspirations of a woman who traded in two bad husbands for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the script can’t decide if critics didn’t like her work due to their snobbishness or because it was shit. (Even composer Danny Elfman is unsure of what tone to take.) One could argue that Margaret Keane has been ripped off and rebranded yet again.

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