![]() In cinema, the past is usually envisioned as shadowy or softly lit, as in Robert Altman’s pre-flashed images. When Margaret Keane is in distress in a supermarket, her hallucinations are iridescent as Christmas lights. The Keanes’ heartache-ridden dream house is illuminated by the Matisse-blue refractions from a shimmering swimming pool. Big Eyes is lavish with saturated hues, from Kodachromish Hawaiian vistas to an A-frame tiki mansion in Woodside (if Sunset magazine had run centerfolds, this place would have been one). Aside from the local interest, the film is electric with color-during the dark parts of the year, you long for a movie with a lot of daylight in it. But it also speaks of how The City’s thick veneer of sophistication dissolves under a cascade of kitsch. It makes loving recreation of the SF Broadway nightclubs where Walter Keane hawked the paintings and hooked his customers. On a local level, Big Eyes cherishes and lampoons San Francisco. As in the old screwball comedies, help comes from a self-satisfied but dogged press: Danny Huston as San Francisco Examiner columnist James Bacon, and Terence Stamp as New York art critic John Canaday. Big Eyes has an old-time movie’s faith that the truth will out. What makes this a peculiarly holidayish movie is the same thing that makes A Christmas Carol popular: comeuppance. ![]() Meanwhile, the brash Walter takes the all the credit and figuratively paints the town. Poor Margaret ends up enslaved in the attic of her flat, cranking out paintings of big-eyed kids as if they were SOS messages. Later, he poses as the artist responsible. Insisting that “lady art” doesn’t sell, Walter takes over the merchandizing of Margaret’s work. She’s picked up at an al-fresco exhibition in Washington Square, in San Francisco’s North Beach, and becomes the victim of an artistic shyster-the poseur, Walter Keane, played by our reigning movie swine, Christoph Waltz. Margaret (Amy Adams at her frailest and prettiest) is a pure, young single mother who deludes herself for comfort’s sake. Big Eyes is mostly a comedy of the endless quarrel between body and soul. But the film withholds judgment on the quality of the art. The film’s sly script, by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ( Ed Wood), tells a tale of abuse and fraud, comparable to Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. God knows he ought to honor the Keanes, since he made a fortune off of his own hollow-eyed rejects: Edward Scissorhands and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, to name a few. Burton has a valuable collection of these waif paintings. Millionaires and movie stars lined up to purchase paintings by the Keanes, who specialized in figures of children, mostly girls, with vastly oversized, pleading eyes-great black vacuums, in which glowed gibbous-moon crescents of gold. ![]() That much is clear in Tim Burton’s mid-1960s comedy, Big Eyes-which follows the reign of the highly marketable art of Walter and Margaret Keane.įor a few years the pair were among the most famous artists in the world. WINDOWS TO THE SOUL: ‘Big Eyes’ centers around Margaret Keane, played by Amy Adams (above), who became famous for her creepy-cute paintings of children with big eyes
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