Directed by Tim Burton
Released Dec. 25, 2014
Thirty years into a career that has dipped into the dreamscape/nightmare well a bit too often, Tim Burton should be congratulated for trying something different with his pastels- and sunlight-draped departure in Big Eyes, a retelling of Walter Keane’s attempt to take credit for his wife’s kitschy big-eyed waif paintings in the 1960s. But his inability to figure out how to capture any of this without his normal crutches of choral arrangements, cartoon antics, and Helena Bonham Carter leaves the film shapeless and undeveloped. The story Burton tackles is a great one, latching onto tangents about pre-sexual liberation gender dynamics, the arrival of pop art on the modern art scene, and the power of ever-building fraud (economic and domestic). What Burton lacks, though, is a capability to approach a dark story set in a sunny setting with a consistent tone or a coherent vision. Though it’s easy to feel intrigued by the story enough to keep going (and Amy Adams work does most of the heavy lifting in keeping this one on the rails), one could be excused for forgetting the uneven and plodding storytelling and style is from a filmmaker once heralded for having an original and absorbing vision.
Grade C+
