Attribution: Fernando de Sousa from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
The Art of the Deal: Film Review of Big Eyes
The film Big Eyes opens with a daring escape. The year is 1958. Margaret Ulbricht (Amy Adams) is—for reasons unknown to the audience—leaving a bad marriage, the irony of which soon becomes apparent after she tries to make a new life for herself and her family on her own. She soon learns that a single mother in 1958 is suspect.
Margaret takes her daughter Jane (Delaney Rae) and moves to the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco where she gets a job painting children’s furniture, even though the owner eyes her up—as a single mom—suspiciously before hiring her, asking her whether it’s fitting that a mother should be working.
Margaret manages to squeak by on her salary, supplementing her income by selling her paintings in the park on weekends. She gets by, but eventually, her ex-husband sues for custody of their daughter, claiming that Margaret cannot support her properly. Afraid that she will lose Jane, she falls into another suffocating relationship, marrying the man she has been seeing for only a short time. She escapes one trap only to fall into another.
This undercurrent of misogyny and discrimination is the foundation on which the story of Big Eyes stands. It is the tale of a woman whose own freedom becomes a danger to her family. Facing loss of custody, Margaret must remarry to keep her daughter. As a result, she becomes caught so deeply in her new husband’s web of deceit and fraud that she loses all traces of her own identity. She becomes trapped once again. Margaret’s tale (a true story) is a story of an awakening of feminine identity (not dissimilar to Kate Chopin’s short story) and in some ways parallels elements of the feminist movement.
While selling paintings in the park, Margaret meets Walter Keane (Christopher Waltz), another painter, a glib and charming man who specializes in selling Parisian landscapes. He asks Margaret about the distinctive way she depicts the eyes of her subjects. They are disproportionately large and usually sorrowful. (I remember Keane prints hanging in my childhood home and in those of my peers. They were pretty much everywhere.) She tells Walter that eyes are the windows to the soul and that she paints what she sees—from the heart.
Walter flirts with Margaret, who is somewhat taken with him. He entrances her with the story of his time as a starving artist in Paris and of the struggles of the life as an artist. After a whirlwind romance (and to ensure custody of her daughter), they marry. Determined to make a living as an artist despite his (reportedly) successful career as a realtor, Walter tries to sell both his and Margaret’s paintings at a gallery. Rejected, he talks the owner of a jazz club into hanging the paintings there. Eventually, they get noticed. During a sale, when a client asks who painted the Big Eyes, Walter takes credit.
Wheedled into going along with the lie by Walter’s specious arguments that only a man could be taken seriously as an artist and that to take credit for her own paintings would lead them to ruin, Margaret agrees to the charade that he is the artist. His appropriation of her artwork through the use of his name is just one more indicator of the subjugation of a woman’s identity through the institution of marriage.
Because of Walter’s marketing and promotional skills, Margaret’s big eye paintings become increasingly popular even though they are reviled by the artistic community as kitschy and schlocky. Despite this, they become incredibly popular. Once Walter tumbles onto the idea of selling copies of the originals, the Keane enterprise turns into an empire.
During this time, to protect their secret, Walter sequesters Margaret into a secluded garret to secretly paint more and more big eyes. She toils in secrecy, producing the paintings for which Walter takes credit. As the empire grows, Margaret finds herself more and more isolated as Walter hogs the limelight. She has no friends, except the outspoke Dee-Ann (Krysten Ritter) and—except for her daughter—few connections with the outside world.
Afraid to disrupt their lives—and coerced and browbeaten by an increasingly aggressive Walter—Margaret refuses to take credit for her work until she discovers a secret from Walter’s past. After being confronted with this new deceit, he sets her studio on fire. She runs but still chooses not to reveal Walter’s deception, at least until she is convinced to finally come clean. After saying on a radio show that she is the actual big eyes artist, Walter strikes back, starting a publicity campaign stating his ex-wife is delusional.
Margaret sues Walter for slander, and during a circus of a trial revealing the extent of Walter’s narcissism and megalomania, Margaret is able to prove that she is actually the artist behind the big eyes paintings and that Walter is nothing but a con man and a thief.
Big Eyes was directed by Tim Burton and written by the team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who collaborated with him on Ed Wood. Elements of Big Eyes, including the suburban neighborhood from which Margaret flees (reminiscent of Edward Scissorhands) and a surreal—and creepy—use of the big eyes motif later in the film (a typically surreal Burton touch), are evident in this film, but for the most part, it is much more of a traditional narrative than Burton’s other work.
The depiction of 1960s San Francisco is beautifully recreated, and the film itself is beautiful, full of oversaturated color and beautiful settings—an idyllic world—not exactly a typical Tim Burton milieu. The irony of this external beauty and elegance compared to the internal privation and mental torture suffered by Margaret reflects the nature of her own art. She toils in anonymity while her husband takes all the credit. The beauty she creates is appropriated by him.
As Margaret, Amy Adams is stellar. Margaret is passive, a product of 1950s America, yet is passionate about her work. Adams’ performance, like her character, is understated, intelligent, and subtle. Margaret is hesitant, quiet, and frightened for her daughter. She is unsure about everything except her art and, as a defense mechanism, rarely shows emotion. However, with a slight mouth twist, half-smile or sidelong look, Adams conveys the depth of Margaret’s anger, frustration, fear, and self-loathing. It is a magnificently calibrated performance. As she becomes more and more outraged at her situation, and finally tells the truth, Adams’ Margaret blossoms like a flower.
Christopher Waltz, on the other hand, seems to have gone way over the top in his portrayal of the narcissistic and manipulative Walter. At the beginning, oozing his particular brand of smarmy charm, he embodies the sort of European type of elegance for which Waltz, as Nazi Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds or bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz in Django Unchained, has become a trademark. As the film progresses, however, Waltz’s charm borders on the excessive, at times closing in on the hysterical.
Waltz, however, is an accomplished and thoughtful actor, begging the question of why this excess became such an integral part of the character. The real Walter Keane, was, by all accounts, as big and gaudy as Walz’s portrayal. The final court scenes, almost laughable for Walter’s dramatic excesses, were drawn directly from the proceedings. He actually did say and do some of the crazy things portrayed in the movie, which brings up the difficult question of how can an actor portray an unbelievable person? Fiction after all, does have to be more believable than reality itself. At any rate, this time Walz’s performance tilts so far over the top that he shoots beyond caricature. It is too much.
As a reflection on art imitating life, it is interesting to note that during the trial secenes, Walter’s tendency to make speeches on the witness stand (even after being admonished by the judge), tell blatant and outrageous lies feeding his inflated image of himself, and his refusal to acknowledge the truth is eerily similar to another public figure whose recent performance in court echoes the same sociopathic traits as Walter Keane.
Big Eyes is a mixed bag, all in all worth seeing. Amy Adams is brilliant in the compelling story of a woman struggling to assert her own identity and find fulfillment in a repressive society. Burton has done a brilliant job of recreating the 1960s West Coast milieu. His brilliant color pallet is a reflection of a glossy external reality that masks the misogyny caused by patriarchal dominance.
Christopher Waltz’s performance is big, so big that it finally goes over the rainbow. While the viewer understands that Walter is a pathological liar, a brilliant con man, and master manipulator who goes too far, at the end it is Waltz’s performance that goes too far. Walter Keane is in the final analysis, a buffoon, but he must be a believable buffoon.