Burton’s film about the painter of big-eyed children asks relevant questions about rights and marginalisation but he can’t quite champion the paintings
Tim Burton matches style and subject, bringing his own brand of directorial oddity to this oddity in the history of popular art, though not precisely pop art.
It is the story of Margaret Keane, whose chocolate-boxy paintings of sweet little kids with big eyes became a commercial smash in the early 60s, though mocked by snooty critics, rather like Jack Vettriano later. But her domineering and abusive husband Walter claimed her work as his own and Margaret finally had to battle through the courts to be recognised as their creator. Amy Adams plays Margaret as an unhappy, determined soul and Christoph Waltz is the oleaginous and thoroughgoing creep Walter. The movie begins with a deadpan quote from Andy Warhol endorsing the Keane brand; Burton’s movie...
Tim Burton matches style and subject, bringing his own brand of directorial oddity to this oddity in the history of popular art, though not precisely pop art.
It is the story of Margaret Keane, whose chocolate-boxy paintings of sweet little kids with big eyes became a commercial smash in the early 60s, though mocked by snooty critics, rather like Jack Vettriano later. But her domineering and abusive husband Walter claimed her work as his own and Margaret finally had to battle through the courts to be recognised as their creator. Amy Adams plays Margaret as an unhappy, determined soul and Christoph Waltz is the oleaginous and thoroughgoing creep Walter. The movie begins with a deadpan quote from Andy Warhol endorsing the Keane brand; Burton’s movie...
- 12/18/2014
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Ciarán Hands is a little too insistent in his grief in this glum bereavement drama
John Banville adapts his own 2005 Man Booker-winning novel as a glum bereavement drama of the rain-on-windowpanes variety. Ciarán Hinds plays a widowed art critic who returns to the scene of a sun-kissed but ultimately painful summer of his childhood a lost world inhabited by louche bohemian adults (Natascha McElhone, Rufus Sewell, both ripe as all hell) who seem to be trapped for eternity in a Jack Vettriano painting. Hinds plays the bibulous grief a little too insistently with jowls a-quiver, but Sinéad Cusack, pithy as the dead wife, and a silky Charlotte Rampling bring some tone. Otherwise, a lugubriously literary affair.
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John Banville adapts his own 2005 Man Booker-winning novel as a glum bereavement drama of the rain-on-windowpanes variety. Ciarán Hinds plays a widowed art critic who returns to the scene of a sun-kissed but ultimately painful summer of his childhood a lost world inhabited by louche bohemian adults (Natascha McElhone, Rufus Sewell, both ripe as all hell) who seem to be trapped for eternity in a Jack Vettriano painting. Hinds plays the bibulous grief a little too insistently with jowls a-quiver, but Sinéad Cusack, pithy as the dead wife, and a silky Charlotte Rampling bring some tone. Otherwise, a lugubriously literary affair.
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- 4/19/2014
- by Jonathan Romney
- The Guardian - Film News
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