“Big Eyes”: When Tim Burton (re) make the biopic – Glamour

• By Olivier de Bruyn /

                                   

• March 18 2015 /

                                     

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© Studio Canal –

 1958, San Francisco. Community leaders and pundits the forefront roll in Cadillac, haunting smoky jazz clubs and attending art galleries where dandies jostle to see and be seen. In these glamorous settings where girls wear all the looks of Hollywood stars and where the guys compete snobbery, an unknown painter is suddenly talking about him. His name: Walter Keane. Through a series of paintings displaying kids with big sad eyes, Walter (Christoph Waltz) is necessary in a few months as a star of the art scene and people of the city. And one press in his gallery, where he displayed a very safe commercial instinct by engaging in a frantic merchandising of its production, as a kind of precursor of Andy Warhol . Problem: The author of these tables, this is not Walter, but his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams) who, trapped in his naivety, agreed to work in the shadows for the sole benefit of her husband. Role play, which fortunately for her, only last so long.

 In Big Eyes Tim Burton returns to one of the most extravagant real stories of American Art. And pays tribute to never pompous artist Margaret Keane, who for years lived under the rule of her husband of forgery. A pervert whose charm and spirit camouflaged very low destructive instincts. Tim Burton invents nothing, then, but, as is his usual excellent, he favors the maximum humor, fantasy all-round and in their heart’s content to concoct an inimitable visual world: both rushed kitsch on

time (the radiant fifties ) and reflect the torments of his characters, as if the viewer was invited to share their twisted fantasies. Never ponderous reflection on art and handling, Big Eyes , the more sober films Burton (but in his case, everything really is relative), leads to such a sad story delusional. A story whose aesthetic ultra singular owes much to the paintings of the “true” Margaret Keane with these paintings as unique heroes, the great kids weird eyes … Partners awesome Tim Burton in this adventure, the two main players are elevated to the level of their director, that is to say, very high. Christoph Waltz , as inspired as in Tarantino ( Inglourious Basterds , Django Unchained ), multiplies metamorphoses grin and raises at once the admiration and anxiety. Faced with the alarming troublemaker, Amy Adams in the skin of a subject first heroin and vengeful, proves that the best US filmmakers have excellent reasons to seek his nervous temperament and atypical . After his performances in Her (Spike Jonze), The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) or American Hustle (David O.Russel) Tim Burton offers a new golden opportunity to love Amy. We thank him for that and for everything else ….

“Big Eyes” by Tim Burton, starring Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz … Released on 18 March.