2014, directed by Tim Burton
I didn’t expect to be watching a Harvey Weinstein movie today.
How it happened was, I had a few hours to kill before my regular afternoon streamer came on, so I was browsing Netflix looking for something I hadn’t already seen that didn’t look terrible, and I came across Big Eyes, which purports to be based on true events about a woman who left her controlling husband in the 1950s and promptly married another guy who stole her art, selling it under his name – Walter Keane. I put it on and not long into the credits, there was his name: produced by Harvey Weinstein. Seems like a weird movie for a guy like him to be so heavily involved in and I was curious so I shrugged and kept it going.
If Big Eyes is a decent movie, it owes it to two things: the story and (some of) the acting. Between the movies I’ve written about before this one and a few more that I watched but never got around to writing up I’ve recently seen quite a few subtle, evocative, oppressive performances of both victims and villains (and people who refused to be victims). This movie did not feature any of them. The funny thing is that the movie actually highlights its own flaws, at one point having the narrator question why Margaret stayed with Walter, something we never really get a feeling for. Even earlier than that Walter announces himself that he’s not capable of subtlety. It’s true – there’s nothing subtle about his performance, which is a problem I have with most of the Tim Burton films I’ve seen. At one point when he’s drunk and menacing Margaret in their flash home, flicking lit matches at her and chasing her to her studio, I had a flashback to Jack Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene from The Shining and almost laughed out loud. Big Eyes isn’t a horror film, but it is a drama about a relationship that should feel horrifying but somehow never once did.
The closest thing to effective cinema we got was probably the court painting scene (the preceding minutes having been another example of Walter being far more ridiculous than unnerving – I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to Edward Norton’s film debut Primal Fear in which he also rapidly and suddenly swaps between personas in a courtroom, only far more chillingly), and even that no doubt could have been done better. It’s the sort of scene that you know should be really memorable, but some people know how to produce that vision and some people don’t.
But then that’s about what you’d expect from a film about a woman being controlled and manipulated by a man, produced by a man who’s only ever been on the wrong side of that particular balance of power. With the right director it could have been much better – producers rarely have that much creative influence – but Burton is a German expressionist whose early influences were sci fi B-movies and Hammer horror films. Visually, the big-eyed waifs that Margaret painted might be reminiscent of Burton’s art style, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good fit to direct a story about her emotionally abusive marriage. Abuse is a subtle monster that knows when to strike and when to charm, and Burton… well, he’s just not capable of subtlety.