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Aug 31, 2016KevinDuJan rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
This is a tough movie to review. Was it bad? No. Was it great? Also, no. I'm glad I watched it but I don't think I would have been happy if I had paid to see it. This is like a TV movie of the week from the 1980s. It could have made a really great Lifetime or Hallmark channel movie. I feel like Tim Burton lost a bet or needed money to redo his kitchen so he slapped Big Eyes together and called it a day. The story is really interesting, in that this talented woman allowed her husband to take credit for her work. I am old enough to remember these creepy paintings still being in people's houses on the walls up through the late 1980s. It was nice learning about where these things came from and why they were popular for a while. What I think Big Eyes fails at is giving us any real sense of why Margaret Keane allowed her husband to dominate her the way that he did. She's still alive. She should have been consulted, with someone asking her to help with the script. The movie could have used a scene or two where she was sitting down with her friend and telling the friend exactly what she was thinking and why she did all this, just so that we the audience would know. The movie just sort of ends and doesn't really say much about what happened later. I looked it up online and Margaret is still painting as of 2016 and has a website. Her style has evolved a little and now she paints human heads onto the stems of flowers and plants. She is talented but there does not seem to be a big demand for the human/plant chimeras she's into these days. This would have made a great Lifetime movie. They would have had so much fun with the story, instead of the movie being so dull the way that Tim Burton made it.