Director: Tim Burton
Talent: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman
Release Date: 26th December 2014
Huh? Oh, Tim Burton’s made a biopic of Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), who made hideous paintings of children with big eyes in the 50s and 60s, the credit for which was claimed by her husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) and to the public success of which we may attribute the same cow-like vacuity and bad aesthetics that see in their contemporary iteration cinema theatres filling up (maybe) for the latest expression of a nudnik like Burton’s profoundly limited, juvenile imagination. This is a film so dull it’d be sound asleep if it weren’t for Waltz’s insufferable, Vaudevillian mugging, or for the appearance (twice) of the least interesting on-screen hallucination of all time — Margaret hallucinates that people have big eyes (like in the title of the film! Oh and also the paintings she makes) — rendering it something more akin to the feverish daymare of a sick child with both limited creative drive and the odious cynicism of past-it hack director simultaneously, inexplicably, running on autopilot and struggling for new relevance.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
