The Reel Review
This good-but-not-great biopic is about Margaret and Walter Keane, the creators of the kitschy, commercially popular paintings of waifs with big eyes in the early 1960s – and how Margaret allowed her sociopath husband to take credit for her work for a decade before exposing him as a talentless fraud. Amy Adams perfectly captures Margaret’s helpless passivity and naïvety while Christoph Waltz’s manic Walter underscores the misogynistic prejudices of the era that contributed to these bad life choices. The film’s time capsule portrait of life in San Francisco and Hawaii’s shockingly undeveloped and uncrowded Waikiki Beach were a nice touch, but producer/director Tim Burton really missed an opportunity to put his unique stamp on the film, instead playing it uncharacteristically straight and making it as disappointingly predictable as the “Big Eyes” art.
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