Big Eyes

If you had a wife with a talent for art, but who lacked the drive to promote herself and her work, which just happened to be your specialty, what would you do? 

Big Eyes is Tim Burton’s ode to the sensitive shy artist Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) and the people who helped and took advantage of her. It’s a biographical film whose story is as strange and captivating as her paintings.

Keane’s unique trademark style consisted of eerie lost girls known as waifs with dark eyes as big as pancakes that looked straight out at the viewer. Margaret painted her subjects with oversized eyes so sad and lonely that they appeared out of all proportion to the rest of the faces that were sometimes set among dingy stark alleyways. 

The driving force behind the popularity of Margaret’s big eyed paintings in the 1950s and 60s is a charming self-promoter and plagiarist Walter Keane, played with relish by Chistoph Waltz - Django Unchained (2012), who claimed to be the creator of Margaret’s paintings, believing that people wouldn’t buy or pay as much for works by a female artist. 

Walter Keane’s crime was not that he promoted his wife’s work and made her paintings an international sensation, although some might argue that it was a crime of bad taste. His crime was that he insisted that he had painted them himself and then convinced his wife to play along by hiding the truth. 

What’s the harm in a little white lie if it brings riches beyond your imagination? After all, he was the one who had done all the promotional leg work, coming up with the ideas to get her paintings noticed by the biggest celebrities and they were both benefiting from all the fame and money coming their way. 

Tim Burton who is an avid collector of Margaret Keane’s popular doe eyed portraits has created a beautiful, sometimes hilarious and thoroughly enjoyable film which doesn’t even look much like a typical Tim Burton film.

Big Eyes is a movie that’s most like one of Burton’s other fun charming conman tales, Big Fish (2003); about a man child who’s living in an imaginary world of wonder. Some comparisons can also be drawn to the documentary My Kid Could Paint That (2007), a controversial story about a father who claimed that his 4 year old daughter was a prodigy who painted abstract art that sold for thousands of dollars.

Amy Adams plays the conflicted and frustrated artist who longed to be recognized for her talents but was kept isolated from her friends and family by her dominating husband to prevent her from revealing the fraud scheme and losing everything they’d achieved.

But it’s Christoph Waltz who almost steals the show with his charming maniacal performance as the sly manipulative Walter Keane, whose unfulfilled ambitions of being a famous artist drove him to plagiarize other's work instead.

Margaret painted from the heart and her prolific work acquired many admirers including Andy Warhol. She believed that the eyes were the window to the soul and she was able to express the essence of people and animals through her unique portraits. 

This film works as an eye opener that may anger and amaze those who are not familiar with the phenomenon of Margaret Keane’s influential surreal Big Eyes art. At 87 her passion for art continues and she is still painting today. 

JP

The Imitation Game

“Sometimes it’s the people that no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine”

This often repeated quote from the film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbach, is certainly an apt one for this story of British attempts to break the unbreakable Nazi Enigma code used by the Germans to communicate secret messages during W.W. II, which was cracked by a man with a passion for crossword puzzles.  

The story is a fascinating one that puts W.W. II’s allied victory over the forces of aggression in a whole new light, but I’m not sure this film does it justice. The focus of The Imitation Game is on the English mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, who not only broke the code but invented the forerunner of the modern computer in the process and was eventually recognized as the father of computer science. 

Like The Social Network (2010), the story is more about Alan Turing’s relationship or lack thereof with his colleagues and his strange anti-social nature, than it is about the Enigma machine or how Turing’s computation machine actually worked and helped to break the German codes. Either the movie doesn’t trust its audience or just isn’t interested with the technical aspects of the story and touches very little on the war itself and the bombing of England by Germany.

Realizing that solving the problem of cracking the enigma code, which changed every day with 590 million new permutations each day, had possibilities that were too numerous for anyone to figure out in a 24 hour period, Turing concentrated his efforts on building a giant calculator using alphabetical symbols that would be able to “break every code, every day, instantly”, using mathematical principals.

Extremely arrogant and condescending to his colleagues, but also brilliant, Turing is here portrayed as a British version of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory or Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network (2010). He could be difficult to work with and had a single minded focus on cracking the code and thus winning the war.

The structure of the film, as with The Social Network, starts with a framing device that has Turing being interrogated by police after his arrest for indecent behavior in 1951, and we flash back as he tells the unusual story of his secret service during the war.

Using intelligence provided by Turing’s team, leaked disinformation and secret lies at the top levels of government the Allied forces eventually gained the upper hand, tipping the balance of the war in our favor. In the end it was a combination of elimination and luck that broke the code, but once it was cracked, the war still continued for years so as not to alert the Germans to the fact that their code had been discovered.

The film has a few too many clichéd dramatic devices and would probably have been better served by a more experienced director, but is helmed instead by Norwegian action director Morten Tyldum in his first big budget English film. 

Still, the film does an excellent job of dramatizing the lives of an intimate group of brilliant nerds stuck in a room agonizing over a solution that will end the war quickly while people are being killed by the thousands every day they failed.

JP