Big Eyes

In the sto­ry of painter and illus­tra­tor Mar­garet Keane, famed for her slushi­ly sen­ti­men­tal depic­tions of small chil­dren (“naifs”) with over­sized eyes and usu­al­ly fur­nished with a sad-look­ing kit­ten or pup­py, one might think that direc­tor Tim Bur­ton – per­haps after John Waters, mod­ern cinema’s fore­most con­nois­seur of kitsch – had locat­ed the per­fect material.

Yet the plot thick­ens, as the events of her life only encom­pass a cur­so­ry dis­cus­sion of whether the work she pro­duced (and still pro­duces) had any real artis­tic val­ue. An open­ing-cred­it quo­ta­tion by Andy Warhol sees the pop art titan affirm­ing that Amer­i­cans vot­ed with their pock­et books when it came to ques­tions of Keane’s cred­i­bil­i­ty, while also sug­gest­ing that Bur­ton and writ­ers Scott Alexan­der and Lar­ry Karaszews­ki are unques­tion­ing in their belief that what she cre­at­ed is Art with a cap­i­tal ​‘A’. Mar­garet is a hero, and this is her trag­ic tale.

Yet Big Eyes may have been a more inter­est­ing film were its mak­ers’ predilec­tions not so front-and-cen­tre. The dra­ma here derives from the antag­o­nis­tic rela­tion­ship she fos­tered with her hus­band, Wal­ter Keane (Christophe Waltz in full Hans Lan­da mode), a smooth-talk­ing wag who wield­ed a toothy grin and his own big eyes so he may slow­ly take cred­it for his wife’s work. As played by Amy Adams, Mar­garet is unworld­ly, naïve and unable to fault her husband’s queer log­ic, a task made even tougher due to the fact that he’s a for­mi­da­ble busi­ness­man and is able to sell poster repro­duc­tions of paint­ings to the bray­ing masses.

From the first moment Wal­ter is shown on screen – shilling his own appar­ent­ly worth­less Parisian street scene paint­ings at a mar­ket with self-aggran­dis­ing vim – it’s clear that he’s the bad guy. It’s through his nous and quick-think­ing that the first vital com­mer­cial break­through is made. Yet, the film is only inter­est­ed in explor­ing how awful it is that Mar­garet is hav­ing the fruits of her per­son­al cre­ativ­i­ty relin­quished from her – unques­tion­ing of whether the fame she enjoys would’ve ever been pos­si­ble were it not for her abu­sive part­ner­ship with Wal­ter. That’s not to say what hap­pened to her was a good thing, but it would’ve been a rad­i­cal move had the film not been so quick to her defence.

Per­haps locat­ing his muse in Keane’s paint­ings, Bur­ton opts for chan­nel­ing broad, unam­bigu­ous emo­tions toward the screen, sel­dom search­ing for a way to explore the sub­texts in any­thing bar an entire­ly super­fi­cial man­ner. The idea that Mar­garet has no idea how her work exists in the world while she’s locked in a cup­board as a one-woman paint­ing con­vey­er belt could be the sub­ject of an entire movie, though here it’s man­i­fest in a slap-dash scene of Keane dis­cov­er­ing a dis­play of her work at a local supermarket.

Also brushed upon is the idea that Wal­ter arrives at a point where he believes his own hor­rid ruse so fer­vent­ly that he has start­ed to attack art crit­ics when they write bad reviews of ​“his” work. Waltz plays the part with a cer­tain wily clown­ish­ness which serves to make any­thing that might lend psy­cho­log­i­cal depth to his char­ac­ter eas­i­ly explain­able as being just bad. Per­haps the most inter­est­ing aspect of the entire film is less the notion of what it’s like to take full cred­it for oth­er people’s work, but what it’s like to cred­it for oth­er people’s bad work. Again, an idea that is men­tioned briefly, and then duly sped away from.

The final ques­tion to ask, then, is whether Bur­ton sees more of him­self in Mar­garet or in Wal­ter. Is he the maligned trash artist who pro­duces watered-down, mass-mar­ket kitsch with utter sin­cer­i­ty? Or is he the snake-oily char­la­tan who has made a name for him­self by leech­ing off the inspi­ra­tion of oth­ers, prompt­ing the ques­tion, can the cre­ation of art every tru­ly be an act of entire­ly per­son­al endeav­our? Does art even exist if no-one is look­ing at it? Bur­ton is look­ing at Mar­garet when he maybe should’ve been look­ing at Walter.