Powerful

As Good As It Gets

A Major Disappointment

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I recently watched Ed Wood which is a biopic Tim Burton did 20 years prior to this. It's almost astounding how different they are. In Big Eyes the characters are charmless, the story is bland and even the overall look of the movie has no discernible qualities.Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are fine but they certainly don't elevate any of this decidedly mediocre material. Everyone appears to be coasting through this movie. The director, the cinematographer and the supporting cast are doing no more than getting the job done.I think it did a good job of portraying that style of art becoming popular and the overall cheapening of what she was creating. But it never wants to present her as a real artist. It more treats it like a parlour trick.It's difficult to map the exact movie where Tim Burton became mediocre but this one is a great example of why I don't usually don't make a point to watch his films anymore. They don't feel like his movies anymore right down to the stories and the set design.Re-watch Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood or even Sleepy Hollow before you consider bothering with this.

(Flash Review)This is based on a true story of Margaret Keane, a single mom and painter of figures with big eyes, who meets another painter fellow who hit it off. She isn't good at selling her work but he is a master at mingling and selling. He sort of backs into claiming her paintings as his and she reluctantly allows it as they are making money. He sells and markets the crap out of them, bringing in world-wide notoriety. From that point on, Margaret tries to deal with living the lie. How will that affect her marriage, relationship with her child and her own pride? The story was well-told with interesting scenes and a Burton-esc purposeful color pallet, atmosphere, symbolism and framing of scenes. Waltz and Adams's character portrayals were fun and filled with depth and variety. Very enjoyable.

Loosely based on a "real" story, the plot is about Margaret, a divorced mother and the painter of kitsch big-eyed children, reproduced on countless every-day items that infested the markets some decades ago. For many years Margaret allowed her second husband, Walter Keane, to claim authorship for her work, while she churned out one canvas after the other and lied to everybody.I am not a Burton's fan and I watched this at home, because it did not seem worth of a cinema outing. I also find those kiddies'paintings very kitsch and did not care much about the author, therefore my expectations were low. Turns out, not low enough.Amy Adams is a good actress, but even she cannot make a sympathetic character out of a woman who - allegedly - lied to her own daughter for years and secretly painted hundreds of canvas of creepy kids to please her hubby. How did she do that? Apparently Margaret's studio was a locked room and her daughter did not found that weird….Christoph Waltz is unfortunately in full sociopath-Hans Landa mood, therefore unbearable. I never liked him much and I positively detested this interpretation. The courtroom scene is hard to bear. It was not Johnny Depp playing weirdo yet again in a Burton movie, but that did not improve the plot.I am not sure what would constitute a spoiler for this, since the plot is so bad and the movie irrelevant. However, I will not disclose the "surprise ending", even if you can find out what happened with a simple search.

"Big Eyes" tells the real-life story of painter Margaret Keane and how she was trapped by a marriage in the worst way: She was stripped of her name and artistic identity through her husband's lies. Tim Burton previously made one of the best films about the artistic struggle with "Ed Wood" and he touches upon similar themes here. Like how "Ed Wood" flips the traditional artistic biopic formula on its head, "Big Eyes" is cleverly inverted here: Instead of portraying the joy of art, the film takes on the trappings of a psychological thriller with Amy Adams's constantly on the precipice of losing everything through the unraveling of a single lie.The film is a departure from Tim Burton's usual Gothic style but it has shadings of the characters he's drawn to in both Walter and Amy. They're both outsiders who respond to their distance to the mainstream art world in different ways. In this way, this is a much more adult work than say "Corpse Bride" or "Alice in Wonderland." The film is egregiously mislabelled as a comedy by organizations such as the Golden Globes (and even some of the other IMDb reviews). The closest it comes to comedic is Walter Keane's sense of self-delusion. That characterization, however, is an important plot point, and ignoring that is a sign that perhaps Burton's reputation prevents the film from being taken as seriously as it should.