Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski

Stars: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, Danny Huston

Everyone loves a juicy retribution story, especially on Christmas Day. Big Eyes serves up a delicious slice of injustice fought and wrongs righted, seasoned with all the whimsy of the titular paintings. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (who worked with Burton on his 1994 biopic about another pop culture icon, Ed Wood) fashion Margaret’s struggle for recognition into an imaginative moral fable. Their screenplay also explores some more serious questions about art and ownership: key issues for our copyright-disregarding age.

Tim Burton tones down the quirk in favor of a colorful period piece. Margaret (Amy Adams) is an archetypal 1950s housewife who finds the courage to flee her first husband and relocate to San Francisco, gateway to the new era. The cocktail frocks are fabulous, especially those worn by Dee-Ann (Krysten Ritter), bohemian BFF. She discovers it’s hard out there for a divorcée with a child to support. Working women are frowned upon, even when they are skilled technical artists. Discouraged, broke, vulnerable, she welcomes the attentions of Walter (Christoph Waltz), a charming landscape painter/realtor, who sweeps her off her feet and back into the security of a respectable married existence. He seems like the nicest guy: attentive, charming, encouraging her to paint her distinctive portraits of big-eyed children. As a cute, artsy couple, they both sign their paintings “KEANE”. Walter, the consummate salesman, even arranges a joint exhibition of their work, her Big Eyes portraits alongside his Parisian street scenes, in a hip jazz club.

This is where trouble creeps into paradise. The first sale is one of Margaret’s waifs, not Walter’s cityscapes. When pressed by the buyer, he takes credit for the work – purely in the interests of the sale, he assures his wife who, reluctantly, lets it slide. The paintings keep selling, Walter keeps lapping up the acclaim, and Margaret is kept hidden in an attic, churning out maudlin representation after maudlin representation of her signature big-eyed child.

Big Eyes is therefore a study of domestic abuse. Walter alternately cajoles and threatens his wife into keeping their little secret, and she must even lie to her daughter about where the paintings come from. She is expected to put up and shut up. A non-Catholic, she stumbles into a confessional where a priest tells her she should obey her husband in all things. But the 1950s are over. By 1964, Margaret has tired of being downtrodden and, once again, grabs her daughter and flees her husband. This time she lands in Hawaii, where she gathers the strength to fight for what is rightfully hers.

Margaret Keane with Amy Adams

Christoph Waltz is excellent as Walter, manifesting the monster with the same deft plausibility as the sweet talker. He takes time to seduce the audience along with Margaret, presenting the abusive husband as charmer rather than thug. In the first half of the movie he’s witty and agreeable, readily admitting to minor flaws. When he tells Margaret that, in his mind, they share creative rights to her pictures (“What’s yours is mine”), he seems motivated only by the most earnest and pure intentions. Yet, as the lie lingers and grows, the stress of perpetuating the fraud pushes him into some very dark places. Amy Adams gives him plenty to play against, turning in another nuanced and sensitive performance. Her Margaret is never a doormat, just a decent woman who realizes, too late, that there’s no easy way out of a gilded cage. She doesn’t paint because her husband tells her to, she creates because she is compelled. Her intentions are as pure as they come: she wants to share her children with the world, and she struggles to understand why her husband might exploit her talents so cruelly.

It’s a long time since Burton made a movie this intimate, although it’s easy to see what drew him to the material. Margaret Keane was an outlier, ignoring the derision of critics to paint what and how she wanted. Burton takes a few none-too–subtle jabs at illustrious members of the art establishment who dismiss popular art, like the Big Eyes prints or Burton’s candy-colored movies, as having zero merit. Jason Schwartzman cameos as a San Francisco gallery owner who sneers at Keane’s work and then can barely contain his disbelief as prints fly off the shelves. Terence Stamp, as New York Times art critic, John Canaday, also pours vitriol on the Big Eyes kitsch, denying Margaret’s talent for capturing emotion with her brush just as much as her husband ever did.

Big Eyes offers a gaudy portrait of creativity as a gift from the gods: some people have it, some people fake it, everyone wants to be loved for it. Although based on a true story, it’s a fairy tale about the power of imagination and pure artistic intention to transcend the slime of the real world.

Big Eyes opens Dec 25^th.

More information (including a gallery of Big Eyes art) at http://bigeyesfilm.com/

Less is always more, especially when it comes to sound design in movies. Throughout his 50 years of movie-making, Scorsese has made dramatic use of silence within the mix.  Take notes:

Martin Scorsese – The Art of Silence from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

Writer/Director:  Joanna Hogg

Stars: Viv Albertine, Liam Gillick, Tom Hiddleston

Joanna Hogg’s third film deals in gracious architectural spaces and the upper middle class creatures who fill them.  Elegant, mannered, a study in static frames and noises off, Exhibition jettisons plot in favor of vignette, presenting a series of scenes from a marriage that’s neither ideal nor enviable, but, by the end of the movie, has come to make a kind of twisted sense.

Artist D (Viv Albertine) and architect H (Liam Gillick) spend their days creating at their respective desks, occupying separate floors of their London townhouse.  They communicate in a rather stilted manner via intercom, implying their relationship has become stiff through overuse.  The third party in this marriage is not a child, or a lover, but the house itself, which appears to have grown between them like a tree root, forcing them apart over time.

D certainly seems to have a more intimate relationship with the house than she does with H.  She drapes herself around its curves, on a windowsill, a corner wall, a rock in the garden.  She seeks approbation and satisfaction in its reflective surfaces.  She dons fancy knickers and performs crude burlesque in one of its empty rooms.  The house gives her what H will not: tranquil approval of everything she does and is.  So she orients herself towards it, usually presenting us (and H) with the back of her head, or the shrug of her shoulders.  Only the house is permitted to gaze upon her face.

D and H have decided to sell the house, after 18 years of co-habitation, so D’s interactions with the furniture and windows have a nostalgic quality from the get-go.  She must indulge her guilty pleasures while she still can.  Consequently, she pushes H, so much less arch and fascinating than the house, away.  He attempts to maintain their connection, but the house has intruded on his side of the relationship too.  He sees D more clearly in reflections than he does in reality, and can only say “I love you” via the intercom, when he’s insulated from her reaction by the wood paneled walls.  Is he reaching out to D, or the echo of who she once was to him?

A brief moment of passion fizzles as D flops on the bed like the proverbial dead fish, unable to ignite even the energy it would take to wriggle out of her clothes.  When he asks, “Can’t I play first?” she denies him via complete inertia, wanting him to stick it in and be done.  H flails above her, frustrated, completely unable to penetrate the barriers she has erected around her secret self, the one she shares only when alone with the house – with whom, of course, as we’ve already seen, she is only too happy to play.

D and H discuss the previous occupants, the architects who designed and built this suave structure, and lived there into their 80s, when the spiral staircase became too much to navigate.  They ponder the possibility of the house absorbing this couple’s lifelong love into its edifice, and, by implication their own. Although they’ve decided to move on, they feel it’s important to preserve the house as it is, a monument to love and regret. They ask the realtor (Hogg’s muse, Tom Hiddleston) if they can insert a “No Demolition” clause into their terms of sale.  He smirks denial at them.  Once they quit possession, that’s it.

Hogg’s eye for negative space is fully utilized here, both in terms of the stylized photography and in the force that drives the narrative.  Exhibition’s truths are more easily located in cavities rather than content – often in a punning manner, as when H gets into a fight with a builder who has impinged upon his parking space, or when another contractor discusses the width of the gap between the elevator car and the shaft.  D and H have identified themselves with a restrictive structure for too long.  It’s only on occasions when they break free, out onto the streets of London, that they are able to access emotional honesty, as when D, alarmed by the wailing of emergency sirens, runs outside in her underwear to check that no accident has befallen H, showing more concern for his well-being in that moment than in any of the scenes inside the house thus far.

The house in Exhibition is not just an enviable address but an all-encompassing lifestyle. As young artists, D and H required a frame, and they found one they thought was perfect within the clean modern lines of the house.  But, over the 18 years they’ve lived there, the frame has become a constraint.  The house contains and confines them in ways that go beyond walls.  For the sake of their love, their careers, their sanity, they must move on.  By the time they’re slicing into a replica house cake at a party to celebrate the sale, symbolically destroying their des res, it’s hard not be glad they’re making their escape to a more creative and fulfilling future.

Held together by two mesmerizing central performances from Albertine (former Slits guitarist) and conceptual artist Gillick, Exhibition is an inventive study of the way structure affects content.  We are where we sleep.  Outwardly precise and mannered, inwardly quite chilling, there are also some darker lessons in here about covetousness, about contemporary obsessions with property values, and a warning that if you gaze long enough into architectural interstices, they will gaze also into you.

Exhibition will screen as part of AFI Fest 2013 on Monday, November 11 @ 7:30 p.m., at Chinese 3 and on Wednesday, November 13 @ 4:15 p.m., at Chinese 2

Writer/Director:  Hong Sang-soo

Stars: Jeong Jae-yeong , Jeong Yu-mi , Kim Sang-Joong

Our Sunhi won the Silver Leopard award for its director, Hong Sang-soo, at the 66th Locarno International Film Festival. It’s a refined chamber piece, shot digitally, and focused on static dialogue scenes that play out in a single take – it’s about as far from a commercial Hollywood movie as it’s possible to get.  Nonetheless, it’s an absorbing narrative, following a young film student and three men who all believe they know her better than she does herself, and therefore have some kind of claim over her affections.

In Hong’s world, characters cross paths, communicate, depart, and move on to the next coffee or beer klatch without once making the connections they think they have.  Alcohol lubricates and befuddles these encounters (empty bottles pile up in the background of almost every scene, part extenuating circumstance, part leitmotif).  The men look back fondly on their conversations with Sunhi, and discuss her behind her back as though she was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a captivating yet eccentric female who exists purely to salve their ills.  Yet Sunhi is more than that, a troubled individual seeking her own path, yearning to express sexual desire, and frustrated by the men’s insistence on shaping her persona to suit their needs.  Tellingly, she disappears long before the movie’s end, amidst the riotous autumnal hues of Seoul’s Changgyeonggung Palace.  The men fail to notice her absence, although she continues to be the focal point of their discussion.

Sunhi (Jeong Yu-mi) herself is emblematic of Generation Y clichés, twisted by indecision and ennui, incapable of solid achievement but convinced of her innate talent and superiority.  After a mysterious absence, she returns to her film school to ask for a letter of recommendation from her former professor,  Choi (Kim Sang-Joong).  She believes studying in the USA will somehow ignite her previously dormant passion for filmmaking.  He scoffs at the idea, and tells her she should embrace creativity and make films now, “while there’s still time”. He agrees to write a letter, but cautions that it will be ‘honest’.

From the first, then, Sunhi is subject to the whims of men who want to tell her what to do.  Stung by the encounter with Choi, she seeks solace in beer, and runs into her ex, Munsu (Lee Sun-kyun).  He, apparently, has had some success with a movie he made about the failure of their relationship, and she feels betrayed.  Munsu, nonetheless, is still in love with her, and waxes lyrical about the reunion to his friend, another movie director, Jaehak (Jeong Jae-yeong).  Choi is also friends with Jaehak, and also inclined to praise Sunhi’s feminine mystique – she has been flirting with him in order to persuade him to change the somewhat harsh terms of his reference letter.  When Jaehak finally meets Sunhi, he too falls for her charms – who wouldn’t, having heard such glowing recommendations?

Tonally, Our Sunhi combines elements of classic farce (eventually, all Sunhi’s suitors collide) with some wry observations on human nature and some poignant emotional punches, such as when Sunhi tenderly caresses Jaehak’s face in a bar, only to have the moment destroyed by a food delivery.  The long takes demand powerhouse performances, and Hong gets gold from some of his regular collaborators, especially Jeong Yu-Mi.  She’s more than able to anchor us in Sunhi’s perspective of the ridiculousness going on around her, twitching melodrama into comedy with a simple furrow of her brow.

Our Sunhi’s gentle pace and quietly building absurdity may not be to everyone’s taste.  It’s the kind of film that rewards those who stick with it, beginning in banality but ending in powerful insights and a decidedly comic final payoff.  Fans of Hong’s other work – he’s a prolific director with more than a dozen credits – will, as always, enjoy the wry observational nature of this piece, which may also provide an engaging entry point for neophytes.

Our Sunhi will screen as part of AFI Fest 2013 on Saturday, November 9 @ 6:30 p.m. in Chinese 3 and on Tuesday, November 12 @ 7:45 p.m. in Chinese 5.