Thumbnail: Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are terrific, and Big Eyes remains a Tim Burton film through-and-through.
The Box Office:
So what happens when a film is set up as an Oscar contender and the awards heat just doesn't arrive? That's the question facing Big Eyes, which was slotted as a would-be Oscar contender for Amy Adams and something of a prestige-scented artistic comeback for director Tim Burton. The film will be given a limited release on Christmas Day before expanding in early 2015, although at this juncture it is possible that the Weinstein Company may just go wide on Christmas Day.
The film comes courtesy of Silverwood Films, Electric City Entertainment, and Tim Burton Productions, where it somehow got made for just $10 million. For what it's worth, that makes it the cheapest film Tim Burton has made since Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which cost $6m back in 1985. Anyway, the film was positioned to perhaps win Amy Adams that Best Actress Oscar or at least score her another nomination.
The initial screenings put the critical consensus in the "good-but-not-great" category, and the Weinsteins seem to be putting their muscle instead behind Jessica Chastain in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant (both solid dramas, by the way). I'm sure Harvey Weinstein can juggle a few chainsaws at once, especially in the Oscar race, so we'll see how this all plays out. For what it's worth, the film should not be judged artistically by how well it does in the year-end awards race. Its artistic (and financial) legacy shouldn't necessarily be tied to whether or not Amy Adams gets a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
This is an example of the somewhat unfortunate phenomenon of the Oscar season. With all due respect to those who cover the awards race with the same obsessive passion with which I cover box office, would-be contenders are judged upon their initial premieres by how well their reception impacts their Oscar chances first and if they are any good second. Nonetheless, after the awards hoopla has died down, I imagine Big Eyes will carve out a solid niche among general moviegoers wanting an adult comedy and/or explicitly feminist/female-centric multiplex option amid the likes of Taken 3 and The Wedding Ringer. As someone who wants Tim Burton to stretch out his palette just a bit as he enters the third act of his career, I am deeply hopeful that this low-budget character drama clicks with general audiences.
It is tempting to proclaim that Big Eyes is exactly the kind of film that Tim Burton should be making. The film is at-a-glance a departure for the man who basically invented modern Hollywood quirk and made "weird" into box office gold. But while I could tell you that this "based on a true story" dramatic comedy feels like somewhat of a change of pace for the now 56-year old auteur who is best-known for big-budget fantasies and stop-motion animated fables, it still feels like a Tim Burton film in theme and spirit. Nonetheless, no matter how you classify the picture in terms of its director, Big Eyes is one of Tim Burton's best films in a long time.
As is appropriate considering the story of what amounts to fraud in the artistic community, Big Eyes paints a deceptively simple picture that masks some genuine profundities. The story concerns the strange tale of Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) who (and this is basically first-act spoiler territory) painted a series of best-selling paintings but only after her husband (Christoph Waltz) insisted that he take credit for the work. That's basically the story in a nutshell, but it's a surprisingly compelling one that wrings its seemingly low-stakes drama for maximum emotional impact. Thanks to a superb star turn by Amy Adams and a strong character performance by Christoph Waltz (who, aside from his Tarantino adventures, has never been better) that reveals utter cruelty disguised as over-the-top comedy, Big Eyes is a relentlessly engaging motion picture.
Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel has a brief history with Tim Burton films that are at-least somewhat set in the real world (that would be Dark Shadows), and he again thrives on the notion of fusing a famously fantastical filmmaker to an even more buttoned-down setting. And yes, if it needs to be said, this is Burton's most aggressively "normal" looking film, lacking even the fantasy sequences of Big Fish. The screenplay, penned by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon), keeps the focus on the core thematic conflict. The notion of financial success at the expense of artistic credit is a potent one, and one on which a tale of suffocating patriarchy is built upon. The film is not shy about the obstacles that face Margaret in terms of merely financial survival, as well as the societal standards that made the initial con an almost logical choice.
It stands to reason that Walter Keane is not 100% incorrect when he argues that Margaret's "big eyes" paintings will sell better with a male artist's name attached to them. It almost makes financial sense at least during the initial run for the recently married woman with a child from a previous marriage in tow to go along with the ruse, but every lie and omission stings as much as the first time. Amy Adams is not generally known as a low-key performer, but this is a superbly non-showy dramatic turn, one of her best overall performances I'd argue. Waltz threatens to steal the picture with a grandiose showboating turn, Waltz lets us see the fakery in every hard sell and the underlying shame of a man who thought we would be great but only achieved success on the (not-entirely-willing) back of his wife. His behavior grows more aggressive as the film goes on, as his personality alternates between clueless pride and knowing shame.
The film is basically the Amy and Christoph show, and the few other major supporting characters exist mostly on the fringes. Danny Huston (needlessly) narrates the story while Krysten Ritter pops up as a supportive friend from Margaret's former life. It's a small performance, but I wouldn't be surprised if she became one of Burton's repertory players. Terence Stamp shines in a small role as a dismissive critic, and the truth of the situation allows a certain shading to what could have been generic "art critic hates art" monologuing. The rest of the cast (Jason Schwartzman, Jon Polito, etc.) are glorified cameo players while Delaney Raye and Madelein Arthur do solid work as Margaret Keane's daughter at the two main junctures of the story.
Despite the fact that the film takes place in the real world and lacks fantastical elements or explicitly larger-than-life production design, Big Eyes feels like a Burton film through-and-through. It is, like a number of his films, about a person who doesn't quite fit with the world in which they exist. Arguably the difference this time is that the outcast is the villain of the piece, and he only gains admittance and acceptance by glorified cheating. The film details repressive social mores as well as any Burton picture, and it is another in Burton's periodic examinations of how men (Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas) and women (Alice in Wonderland, Batman Returns) and/or both (Sweeney Todd) suffocate under the norms of the place or era in which they live.
If you look at Mr. Burton's filmography (sixteen films in twenty-nine years), you'll find a film that represents a so-called change of pace every two of three entries. In terms of live-action films, Big Eyes is less a bold departure for the filmmaker and more of a periodic vacation from what the expectations of a Tim Burton film is supposed to be. It is merely stands alongside the likes of Ed Wood, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd as "one of those" Tim Burton movies in contrast to the more fantastical entries. I hope Burton makes more films like Big Eyes mostly because it is an artistically superior picture to the likes of Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows, but I wouldn't dream of demeaning his better fantastical efforts (Sleepy Hallow, Batman Returns, etc.).
Big Eyes is as much a Tim Burton film as Big Fish or Frankenweenie, and it's a high water mark on a fascinating filmography.
