Tim Burton's movie Big Eyes will not get the viewers that Clint Eastwood's movie American Sniper is guaranteed to have, but make no mistake about it, Tim Burton is an equally deserving director when it comes to applause for making great movies.
As directors Burton and Eastwood are polar opposites. Burton makes quirky, offbeat movies that are often satirical and always strange; Eastwood makes realistic films that capture the emotional extremes of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Both men make amazing movies that you simply can't miss.
I thought Big Eyes might be completely blindsided by the hype for American Sniper, but somehow Amy Adams managed to win a Golden Globe for Best Supporting actress. In Big Eyes, Adams played artist Margaret Dorks Hawkins, who has her paintings claimed by her shady husband Walter Keane, a fast-talking real estate salesman. Keane, who couldn't paint a thing, claimed that he had painted most of his wife's work.
Margaret Keane's true story is fascinating and almost unbelievable simply because it's difficult to fathom how Margaret could allow anyone–even her husband–to steal her credit. That can only seem strange if you are not familiar with the 1950s, when Margaret Keane's paintings of waifs with saucer eyes became popular. In the 50s women found it almost impossible to penetrate the corporate, professional or artistic domain of men.
That Keane could accomplish this nearly impossible goal with something as bizarrely fascinating as paintings of waifs with haunting, saucer-like eyes says something about the taste of the American masses in the 50s and 60s.
It's almost as though Americans wanted to put the suffering of World War II behind them, and these strange, almost alien-looking children could give them distance without making them feel cold and heartless. Walter Keane just might have been the only person who could pitch a sale for these paintings.
Margaret might not have ever become rich or famous without her silver-tongued husband. That doesn't excuse him for stealing her credit, but it does make for lively classroom discussion about plagiarism, the plague of all students who think that anything they get off the Internet belongs to them and not the creator.
But back to the historical significance of this movie... It is difficult to imagine just how impossible it was for women to penetrate the male-dominated world of the 50s. Julia Roberts shows how difficult it was in the movie Mona Lisa Eyes. In that movie, Roberts plays an Art History professor in Wellesley College, a place where girls went to snag rich husbands.
In Big Eyes Margaret Hawkins flees a bad husband. She ekes out a living and supports a child by painting scenes on baby cribs for a furniture factory. When her husband accuses her of being an unfit mother, Walter starts to look mighty good to her.Mona Lisa Eyes and Big Eyes do a superb job in showcasing that pioneering period when women set the stage for women's liberation.
On the technical side, I can't think of enough kudos to bestow upon Tim Burton as the director of this film. Burton uses his quirky interpretation of art honed by his expertise in animation (The Corpse Bride, James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas) to create a movie in which every single frame is a work of art.
Even when he's not doing animation, Burton directs strange movies (Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Big Fish and Sleepy Hollow). All of Burton's movies seem coloured by a love for comics and animation. (Burton directed Batman movies as well). Burton uses frames and angles for shots that are found in comics to create the bizarre tone that surrealism could not have captured in this movie.
In doing this, Burton creates a moving movie experience based on character development and solid technique that comes from the structure of comics rather than relying on gimmicks or costly high-actions scenes.
I was utterly awe-stricken by how Burton defined each frame in the movie with layers of images so that even the background of a frame told a compelling story.Big Eyes is a must-see movie for movie connoisseurs, art and art history students, animation students, film students and students in general who need to identify what art is. This is a movie about art appreciation and film technique as much as it is a biography of an artist.Big Eyes is currently showing at MovieTowne.