Tim Burton. That name brings out praise and backlash, the latter in the past several years as the director has done a series of films in the realm of remakes/revisionings/re-whatever (Alice in Wonderland, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dark Shadows), and while those films aren't all worthless - they vary in quality from being total crap to being OK - and he's made some great work in the middle (his last "Big" movie, Big Fish, and Frankenweenie and Sweeney Todd are the outliers), he seems to have lost that 'something'. He somehow finds a way to be wonderful again as a filmmaker with the story of Margaret Keane, and her unfortunate marriage to Walter Keane - who claimed for many years (and she played into) that he created all of her wide-eyed paintings of children for mass consumption - and how she got out of it.
Perhaps one of the things people may notice is that it doesn't feel totally like a Burton movie. It doesn't have, with the exception of maybe or two moments where Margaret gets a little nutty (seeing people with the big-eyes out and about), those Burton oddball hallmarks usually associated with him. And yet, for as "normal" a biopic-drama about how and most certainly why a woman gets put down in a patriarchal society - it has an awesome feminist streak of revolt in its soul - it's a very colorful movie. Burton must have been very attentive with his cinematographer and designers, and every color POPS in the movie, even when things get dark in the marriage of the Keanes, and that was something I could sense him working out. It's closer probably to the palette of Big Fish, only still with its feet in the real world, much as it can be in Burton's world.
There is a lot of humor here too, some of it from supporting characters like Jason Schwartzman's snotty art dealer, and Terence Stamp as an even snootier art critic. Deadpan delivery, especially in the face of Christoph Waltz it would seem, is the best way to go. And speaking of Waltz, he is of course amazing here, full of brio and gusto and when he has to be kind of sweetly subtle... though if there is a criticism for me it's when he has to go really bad/over-the-top, and maybe this is based on what happened with them and Margaret's daughter, but when he gets into 'bad husband' mode - the scene with the matches I'm thinking of - it's all just too much for this movie, and Waltz maybe takes his dastardly characterization too far. That may be the point, but it didn't work for me, though only in that instance.
Amy Adams is a delight, there's hardly a way to put another word around it, but really digs in to the despair that Margaret feels as she doesn't stop herself from perpetuating the falsity of her paintings' origins. A lot of the movie is about perception and lies and deceit, but also the fun in unmasking it (the final courtroom scenes), and as much as this is a serious film, Adams is having fun making a fully rounded character, and opposite Waltz she has to be at the top of her game. Something about women in Burton films is always fascinating to me, how he shows them all as fully-rounded, wounded, alive, smart, on-their-toes and unpredictable creatures (Catwoman, Carter in Sweeney Todd, Eva Green to an extent in Dark Shadows, supporting players in Big Fish, more I can't remember now), and Margaret Keane is another.
It's a rousing, crowd-pleasing drama that is like an in-spirit follow up to Ed Wood (also from the same writers): once again about someone who doesn't really have 'talent' in that usual sense of the word - people who bought Keane's paintings probably took them as seriously as people who went to see Wood's movies - but there was a person there, and world that made it all happen, and it was one that people take for granted (the world of commercialized art and the world of low-grade movies). If it's not the giant that Burton's Ed Wood is, it does what it sets out to well enough to be Burton's most substantial work, certainly on a dramatic level, in over ten years. Hope he keeps it up is all.
Perhaps one of the things people may notice is that it doesn't feel totally like a Burton movie. It doesn't have, with the exception of maybe or two moments where Margaret gets a little nutty (seeing people with the big-eyes out and about), those Burton oddball hallmarks usually associated with him. And yet, for as "normal" a biopic-drama about how and most certainly why a woman gets put down in a patriarchal society - it has an awesome feminist streak of revolt in its soul - it's a very colorful movie. Burton must have been very attentive with his cinematographer and designers, and every color POPS in the movie, even when things get dark in the marriage of the Keanes, and that was something I could sense him working out. It's closer probably to the palette of Big Fish, only still with its feet in the real world, much as it can be in Burton's world.
There is a lot of humor here too, some of it from supporting characters like Jason Schwartzman's snotty art dealer, and Terence Stamp as an even snootier art critic. Deadpan delivery, especially in the face of Christoph Waltz it would seem, is the best way to go. And speaking of Waltz, he is of course amazing here, full of brio and gusto and when he has to be kind of sweetly subtle... though if there is a criticism for me it's when he has to go really bad/over-the-top, and maybe this is based on what happened with them and Margaret's daughter, but when he gets into 'bad husband' mode - the scene with the matches I'm thinking of - it's all just too much for this movie, and Waltz maybe takes his dastardly characterization too far. That may be the point, but it didn't work for me, though only in that instance.
Amy Adams is a delight, there's hardly a way to put another word around it, but really digs in to the despair that Margaret feels as she doesn't stop herself from perpetuating the falsity of her paintings' origins. A lot of the movie is about perception and lies and deceit, but also the fun in unmasking it (the final courtroom scenes), and as much as this is a serious film, Adams is having fun making a fully rounded character, and opposite Waltz she has to be at the top of her game. Something about women in Burton films is always fascinating to me, how he shows them all as fully-rounded, wounded, alive, smart, on-their-toes and unpredictable creatures (Catwoman, Carter in Sweeney Todd, Eva Green to an extent in Dark Shadows, supporting players in Big Fish, more I can't remember now), and Margaret Keane is another.
It's a rousing, crowd-pleasing drama that is like an in-spirit follow up to Ed Wood (also from the same writers): once again about someone who doesn't really have 'talent' in that usual sense of the word - people who bought Keane's paintings probably took them as seriously as people who went to see Wood's movies - but there was a person there, and world that made it all happen, and it was one that people take for granted (the world of commercialized art and the world of low-grade movies). If it's not the giant that Burton's Ed Wood is, it does what it sets out to well enough to be Burton's most substantial work, certainly on a dramatic level, in over ten years. Hope he keeps it up is all.