What a yearning for the past we see in the work of Tim Burton. When he focuses on the future, he creates a movie such as his undistinguished “Planet of the Apes” remake. Turn the clock back, however, and his homesick love for antique bubble gum playing cards, sci-fi pulp novels and B-movie horrors hits nostalgia overdrive.
After “Ed Wood,” his delightful 1950s biography of America’s most dreadful filmmaker, Burton once again offers a true story that scratches the kitsch. “Big Eyes,” set in the early ’60s, once again salutes ham-and-cheese creativity. It tells the far-fetched but factual story of the past century’s worst artistic team.
Meet Margaret Keane (hushed Amy Adams), a prolific, capable but tasteless creator of kids’ portraits, and her husband, Walter (vigorous Christoph Waltz), who depicts trite street scenes. We encounter young Margaret at the moment of her first divorce, zipping from her Southern home to a new, if uncertain, life in California with her beloved daughter.
She and Walter cross paths in San Francisco, where her painter-in-the-park weekend transactions are failing until he offers to help. A self-confident wheeler-dealer, he begins as a charmer. For a long time following the couple’s Hawaiian wedding, they seem to be a blissful union.
