Big Eyes

Big Eyes (12A)

USA 2014  106 mins  Dir: Tim Burton  Starring: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman, Terence Stamp, Danny Huston

“The fifties were a grand time – if you were a man,” observes narrating newspaper hack Dick Nolan (Huston) wryly in the opening line of Tim Burton’s most atypical movie since Ed Wood. It’s no coincidence that Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski also wrote the screenplay for that film. With credits including Man on the Moon and The People vs Larry Flynt, the duo are at their empathetic best working from eccentric true stories. Mercifully, the satirical Big Eyes wears its feminist message lightly, allowing us to savour Christoph Waltz’s magnificent performance as wolfish, sleazy and manipulative hustler Walter Keane. On this showing, Burton should emerge from the dark shadows and have fun in the Californian sun more often.

The story begins with Margaret Ulbrich (Adams) fleeing her hubby and heading for San Francisco with her pre-teen daughter in tow. The fifties are no time to be a single mother in America and she soon winds up scratching a living at fairs, where she draws distinctively big-eyed pictures of passing nippers for a dollar a pop. Meek, naive Margaret doesn’t stand a chance when predatory fellow artist Walter Keane turns on his megawatt charm, and the couple are swiftly married. Nobody is interested in his own crappy French street scenes, but Margaret’s kitschy, creepy big-eyed children quickly catch on. Devious, dissembling Walter persuades her that he should pass them off as his own (“People don’t buy lady art,” he tells her dismissively), and before long she’s churning them out by the yard for an adoring public. But as the cash pours in, along with celebrity endorsement from the likes of Joan Crawford and Andy Warhol, Margaret becomes ethically and religiously troubled by the deception.

Burton permits himself only a few digitally enhanced flights of fancy, which is no bad thing given that this builds to a courtroom climax scarcely more believable than his fantastical goth-lite romps – though we’re assured it unfolded pretty much as depicted. There are strong if rather broad supporting performances from Jason Schwartzman as a snooty hipster gallery owner (“Clear out the clutter before the Taste Police arrive!”), Krysten Ritter as Margaret’s more worldly pal (“He’s diddled every skirt on the art circuit,” she warns her of Walter) and Terence Stamp as a pompous art critic who is Ratatouille‘s Anton Ego made flesh. One could argue that Waltz somewhat overshadows Amy Adams, but that’s simply an authentic reflection of Walter and Margaret’s real-life relationship. And the dividend is that we get to enjoy the grotesquely shameless huckster raging: “What’s wrong with the lowest common denominator? It’s what this country was built on!”