Eyes on the prize
Your parents might have had a few prints hanging around the sala or the foyer when you were growing up, their large gaping waif eyes (the paintings’, not the parents’) following you around as though seeking a tuna fish sandwich. The Jeopardy answer in the form of question is: “What are the paintings of Walter Keane?”
Except — as those who follow obscure trivia about kitsch art from the ‘60s undoubtedly know (and incidentally, SPOILER ALERT!) — Walter never did paint those big-eye paintings. His wife did.
Big Eyes (now showing in cinemas) is Tim Burton’s little sub-Oscar sideshow of talent and storytelling, distilling the tale of the Keanes — Walter and Margaret — who grew quite rich off a series of paintings of big-eyed children. Big Eyes nabbed a few Golden Globe nominations — mainly for Amy Adams’ portrayal of Margaret and Christoph Waltz’s take on the ego-driven husband Walter — but didn’t make the Academy Award cut. Too bad, as it’s one of Burton’s more entertaining and thoughtful outings.
Margaret Ulrich left a stifling marriage with her daughter to pursue a more “free” existence in ‘50s San Francisco. She soon met up with aspiring landscape painter Walter Keane, a real estate broker by profession, and a new marriage ensued. This was the era of early Beatnik poets, blossoming art galleries, and an emerging generation of irony-laced purveyors of culture. “Kitsch” was just starting to become a thing in the US, and certain people adored it. Margaret didn’t know from kitsch, but her “naïve” paintings of street children — haunted, bug-eyed, painted with brooding shadows and jagged urbanscapes as background — started grabbing attention when new husband Walter had them hung on a jazz club’s walls, alongside his own more conventional Paris scenes. The only trouble is, when people asked who painted the kids, Walter claimed sole credit.
The eyes have it: Amy Adams labors in the vineyards of kitsch art as Margaret Keane.
This being the ‘50s, San Francisco or not, women were not expected to do better than their husbands. The man was still the breadwinner of the house, and Walter had a salesman’s personality. For over a decade, Margaret apparently kept mum about the deception, retreating to her studio to crank out more “Keanes,” and allowing Walter to take all the glory and accolades.
Burton is on firm ground here, investigating the culture of late-‘50s America, the chauvinism and art wars (some enjoyed the Keane paintings ironically, while others, like actresses Joan Crawford and Natalie Wood, simply liked the style), not to mention the hairdos and Beat trappings.
As Walter, Waltz displays a disturbing trend toward one-dimensionality, with his marionette smile and imploring gestures. We have seen this Christoph Waltz before, it seems, though he certainly earns our scorn as a credit-grabbing egomaniac.
Speaking of big eyes, Adams continues to convey rivers of doubt, shades of resolve and flickering humanity through her own peepers. Whether she’s laboring away in a dark studio, cigarette slanting from her mouth, or protecting her daughter from the truth, Adams nails the figure of a woman who allows her voice to be stifled for years.
The script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski takes on some good Burtonesque questions — What is art? Does mass-production of art diminish it? What is authorship? — while propelling the true-life story forward. Walter saw an opportunity, when Margaret’s paintings started selling faster than she could paint them, to license and mass-produce the images, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Keane prints in many a kitschy ‘70s sala or dining room.
The Keane paintings divided critics sharply — some saw horrible sentimentality, while others responded to the naked Expressionistic technique, the implicit existential themes. Mostly it was those eyes: huge pools, way out of proportion to any human specimens walking around. But certainly a style all its own.
Walter continues to personally sign Margaret’s works as blithely as he enchases all the big checks for her sold paintings, and the Keanes move into a lavish ‘60s California bungalow by the ocean. But there Margaret starts to feel entombed, and eventually her silence breaks. She reveals all, almost casually, on a local radio show.
Looking back at interviews in, say, Life magazine in 1965, it’s astonishing what a skillful liar Walter was: “My psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents,” he told Life about the birth of the “big eyes.” “In their eyes lurk all of mankind’s questions and answers. If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young, he wouldn’t need a road map. I wanted other people to know about those eyes, too. I want my paintings to clobber you in the heart and make you yell, ‘DO SOMETHING!” (These lines are recited in the movie by Waltz with all the hammy sincerity you might imagine.) Walter even compared himself to El Greco, declaring, “Nobody could paint eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane.”
The jig was up by the early ‘70s, and Big Eyes takes us to a truly bizarre painting showdown in a Honolulu courthouse, where Margaret sued to reclaim ownership of her paintings. Nowadays, it’s possible to see some of the (intentional or not) kitsch inspiration of those Keane paintings in postmodern painters like Jeff Koons. And Keane has resurfaced repeatedly in movies (Woody Allen’s Sleeper, remarking on a painting: “It’s very Keane!”) and even in Oscar shows (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler “outing” Emma Stone as the inspiration for Big Eyes). And unlike some of Burton’s movies, which seem a little lifeless (even if he is a fan of Dark Shadows and Planet of the Apes), Big Eyes has an air of sincerity, buoyed by good performances, a true story (he seems to excel at these, like Ed Wood) and perhaps by the fact that Tim Burton himself is a big collector of Keane paintings.
