Big Eyes

Film (2014)

With Amy Adams (Margaret Keane), Christoph Waltz (Walter Keane)

In San Francisco in the late 1950s, Margaret, who has just left her husband to strike out on her own, paints portraits with big, soppy eyes and she encounters Walter Keane who seems to paint Parisian landscapes. They fall in together, get married, and the portraits become a raging success, with one curiosity – it seems Walter has painted them.

Both of these superb actors lend a hand to this bilaterial biopic about a bizarre marriage and partnership.

Adams proffers incredible, revealing, watery eyes throughout, subtly pained and on the verge of tears, perfectly attuned to her character’s paintings, while maintaining a steely self-possession somewhere within that soft and hazy outer shell.

Waltz is his paradigmatic wacko self, so vividly on fire in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Water For Elephants (2011) and Django Unchained (2012). He specializes in an absolutely charming form of madness, perfect for this role. He reassuringly drives speedily towards pleasant vistas on the way up, and then steers wildly, and precipitously close to the edges, on the way down.

This is a fascinating bit of contemporary art history, even if one doesn’t run to validate these open-gazed works as artistic. The Keanes broke new ground in the reproduction and the commercialization of art and created, during the 1950s and 1960s a memorable, if weird, form of iconography. Their personal and professional story is every bit as weird as their art.

If you’re feeling in the mood to take in a full night of narcissism, pair this with the recent and chilling Gone Girl, cooked out of similar ingredients. These are both grim tales, but Big Eyes drives towards a psychological finish line while Gone Girl takes off into dimensions beyond desperation.

– BADMan