Review: Big Eyes

Subtle (!) for a Tim Burton movie, Big Eyes makes it a point to take on topics many members of the ascot-tying art community find gauche — commerce, sexism, publicity. That doesn’t mean this biopic of bedraggled painter Margaret Keane is a revolutionary bit of work, but it deserves a little credit for making sure the right people squirm. Keane’s distinctive waif paintings, featuring kids with peepers like “big stale jellybeans,” became a lowbrow phenomenon in the ’60s, and Amy Adams makes a nice-enough run at the artist and her independent spirit. As her husband Walter, who for years took full credit for his wife’s work, Christoph Waltz is the most loathsome kind of asshole, and he’s so good at sucking that he basically reshapes a complex marital struggle into a black hat-white hat fencing match. You’re allowed to root for her and hate on him, and though both parties are deserving of these assignments, that doesn’t automatically make the clash interesting. It’s the secondary influences of the media and the public, and Burton’s unexpectedly tempered treatment of them, that offer the most interesting observations about art, then and now.