Yes, but is it art?
I’ve never been a fan of Picasso or Rothko, but have always felt like they were real artists. And though I love the work of Don Martin and George Pérez, I don’t think of their work as Art. The work of Keane falls somewhere below comic books and somewhere above grade school finger painting. For whatever reason, people in the 60s loved these creepy paintings of kids and cats with big eyes.
But why anyone loved or hated the paintings is a mere side issue of Big Eyes, the story of how one man used his wife’s paintings to pretty much invented modern marketing, make a buttload of money, and ruin his marriage and his life.
Margaret is a struggling artist when she meets Walter, a fellow struggling artist who is a successful real estate broker who longs for more from life. He sells his boring paintings of Paris streets from time to time, but he sees that Margaret has a gift. They get married on a whim and Walter makes a few random efforts to sell their art, one of which succeeds. Walter is jealous that people like Margaret’s paintings better than his, so he tells people that he painted them. For some never quite clear reason, Margaret decides to go along with this plan. She even lies to her daughter-who has watched her mother paint her entire life-telling her that Walter does all the painting.
I’ll be honest, I never heard of the Keanes, though I have seen random images of things with large eyes over the years. I had also never heard that this was the biggest art fraud in history, since a husband claiming credit for a wife’s work didn’t exactly strike me as fraud. They both benefited from Walter’s obsessive marketing efforts. It could be argued that without Walter, no one would have ever heard of Mrs Keane or ever seen her depressing artwork. But that’s not the story told by Tim Burton, Walter is the villian and Margaret is an abused genius.
Big Eyes was an interesting movie with good acting and great sets and a lot of painterly touches here and there. A few of the background shots looked a lot more like art than the sad little girls with large eyes did. I liked all of the details, but the general story lacked depth and feeling. I couldn’t get too worked up about Walter stealing Margaret’s thunder since Margaret never seemed to give a damn about it herself.
Big Eyes had a few good moments, but it could have used a few more.
