This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.
“The 50s were a good time if you were a man,” an unseen narrator says at the beginning of director Tim Burton’s latest bizarre tale, Big Eyes. The movie is based on the stranger-than-fiction story of artist Margaret Keane and her husband Walter Keane, who signed his name on her paintings of saucer-eyed, forlorn-looking waifs that were everywhere in the 60s.
Amy Adams, always terrific, and Christoph Waltz, in his usual effective turn as a weirdo, both landed Golden Globe nominations in the comedy lead acting categories. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Tim Burton on Ed Wood, also received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. And the Women’s Film Critics Circle, of which I am a member, gave the film the dubious distinction of citing it this year’s worst male images in a movie.
The colorful tale begins after Margaret flees her abusive husband in the late 50s for San Francisco, where she seeks a better life for her and her daughter. She meets the sweet-talking Walter at a street fair where he admires her paintings of children with sad-looking, enormous peepers. His Parisian street scene painting he claimed were inspired by his life and study in Paris. She falls for him. Soon she realizes she’s never actually seen him paint.
After they married, Walter talked Margaret into letting him put his signature on her paintings. Nobody buys “lady art,” he told her. In the beginning she was a willing but reluctant accomplice, but soon she felt the enormous cost of giving up her name and ownership of her greatest passion, her art. Walter was a genius at marketing. He bypassed the snooty gallery owners who detested the paintings and made a fortune when he mass-produced them as prints, posters and other tchotchkes.
By the time the fraud was uncovered in the 1970, Margaret’s paintings, which in their time were either adored or reviled, were no longer in style, and her story forgotten or never much known. Big Eyes, a Weinstein Company release, is as much about Margaret’s personal and professional awakening as it is about the perpetration of an art fraud. But it’s also about how Margaret’s paintings of urchins with enormously dilated pupils captured the zeitgeist of those trippy times.
Margaret, who at 87 is very much alive and still painting, attended the New York premiere last week and had a ball promoting the film, according to Adams, who participated in a press conference for Big Eyes last week at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. Burton and screenwriters Alexander and Karaszewski also attended along with cast members Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, and Jason Schwartzman.
Burton, who generally works with the same cast over and over, notably Johnny Depp, who has been in eight of his films, and Helena Bonham Carter, from whom he just separated, was asked about his casting choices for the leads. Burton replied, “Obviously they’re great actors. He’s Walter. She’s Margaret. And it was just fresh energy for me to work with new people ’cause everybody’s been getting sick of the people I was working with,” he laughed.
As portrayed in the film, Margaret is a timid woman and a single mother with few options in an era of rampant sexism. She found her voice after she left Walter and landed in Hawaii where she became a Jehovah’s Witnesses after a few of them happened to come to her door. She credits them with her resolve and determination to tell the truth. It is great fun to watch Adams portray her character’s transformation into a steely and determined woman resolved to take back her ownership of her paintings, no matter what you think of the portraits. (I hated them back in the 60s and hate them even more now that the children smile instead of frown.)
My favorite scene in the movie is the court showdown between Margaret and Walter. She sued him for slander after he insisted he was the painter of the signature works. The judge staged a paint-off and ordered Walter and Margaret to recreate a painting in front of him and the jury. Margaret produced a painting in under an hour. The unhinged Walter, who acted as his own lawyer, complained of shoulder pains and never painted a stroke. (Until his death in 2000, Walter insisted the paintings were his.)
At the press conference, Adams was asked if the appeal of playing a subtle character like Margaret was that it came after her role as the brassy femme fatale in David O. Russell’s American Hustle.
“I didn’t really think of her as a subtle person. I just thought of her as Margaret and that’s Margaret, so it wasn’t as though I was aiming to portray a thing. I was portraying a person and she’s a very understated human being although she gave us some zingers the other night,” Adams laughed. Margaret, who is conservative and dresses primly, attended a dizzying round of receptions, screenings and premieres to promote the film last week.
Adams noted she met Margaret only a couple of weeks before they began to shoot the film and the two sat down and talked. (Margaret has a cameo where she’s sitting on a park bench.) Adams said, “The thing that I liked about Margaret, and what I thought kept her from being a victim, because I didn’t want her to seem like a victim, is when you talk to her she still takes responsibility.”
Margaret has some compassion for Walter. She told Adams, “‘Maybe if I didn’t lie he would not have turned out like he did,’ she told me.” She added, “Margaret also gives Walter credit for her career, saying ‘I wouldn’t be known if it wasn’t for him and he was a genius at what he did and I would never have the following I have today.’”
In response to a question about how she related to the film and her character and how being a parent informed her performance, Adams said she read the script before she became a mother: “I saw Margaret one way and then after I had my daughter and had been a mom for about four years, I saw her completely in a totally different way.”
The actress added, “Being an artist and being a mom sometimes keeps you at odds and not to say you can’t do it, but an artist can feel very isolated, very narcissistic, and being a parent needs to be something completely different and so I understood that sort of thing and trying to make the right decisions and then getting caught in a lie with your child. That was something I found really fascinating and I was really interested by that dynamic.”
Adams also related to Margaret’s discomfort in front of a crowd, like the press conference in which most question were directed at her and Burton. “Like, gosh, I have to talk in front of people,” she laughed. “But yeah, it played a great deal in how I related to the role, and Margaret said something great the other day. She was asked what she wanted people to walk away from the movie. She said, “’Stand up for yourself. Be true to yourself. Read your Bible and don’t lie.’”
The movie makes meaningful comments on the overwhelming sexism of the time, and Adams was asked if by the 70s Margaret identified with the feminist movement. Margaret wasn’t part of any movement, Adams replied: “As she puts it, ‘I was in a closet making paintings,’ so I like the way that Larry and Scott brought that into the movie because I do think whether intentional or not she did do something that was very much of the moment in standing up for herself and I do like that that sort of coincided with such a great portion of the feminist movement.”
After the press conference, Adams told me, “It was nice to get to play a woman, who even if it was unbeknownst to her, really spoke for a lot of women.”
On another note, the Weinstein Company sent out a press release supporting Amy Adams, who went on the Today show the other day but whose appearance was pulled when she expressed reservations about talking about the Sony hacking scandal.
The TWC release read: “We firmly stand behind Amy Adams. We’ve been lucky enough to have had her talents grace several of our films. We are certain her fellow actors and directors would all agree, she is nothing but the consummate professional both on and off set. Amy decided to speak up for herself and express her disappointment that Today would feel the need to ask her a question she did not feel comfortable, and rather than respect her opinion or continue the discussion, the reaction was to pull her appearance from the show.”
Amy Adams took the message of Big Eyes to heart. Can anyone imagine the Today show canceling Bradley Cooper or any other A-list male actor for the same reason they pulled Amy Adams’ appearance?
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