Now that we’re in January, I’ve entered my annual frantic scrambling to see movies so I can understand award season. It’s not that I don’t see a lot of big, important films over the course of the year, but I do tend towards ones I, you know, actually want to see. Around January, with the announcement of the Golden Globes, it starts to become clear which movies, regardless of quality, are the ones I have to see to understand the jokes at the Oscars. So, while I was back in Georgia visiting my parents, I took the opportunity to see two biopics that are in the “award show bait” genre: Big Eyes, a biopic about the paintings of Margaret Keane, and how her husband claimed her work as his own, and The Theory of Everything, which documents Stephen Hawking’s first marriage, and the progression of his ALS.
I didn’t love or hate either film, and since I had similar problems with both of them, I figured I’d tackle them both in the same blog post.
Big Eyes
I can’t really talk about Big Eyes, the period piece biopic directed by Tim Burton and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, without talking about the other biopic period piece directed by Tim Burton and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Ed Wood. To say I might have had a slight obsession with Mr. Burton’s work as a teenager is… a bit of an understatement, but even now I’m past my fanaticism (partly due to the film Alice in Wonderland, because wow) I’m still fond of his style of film making, and Ed Wood uses it amazingly. The main character, the worst filmmaker of all time, is manic and wacky and somewhat unashamed of his angora fetish. The slightly more realistic version of Burton’s usual style balances out the insanity of the character to make the film feel like we’re inside his mind, and fantastically reflects the possibilities Ed sees in film making, no matter how misguided he is.
The story Big Eyes tells is more interesting than the one Ed Wood tells, but the script doesn’t quite know how to show it’s characters. Margaret (Amy Adams) ais the center of the story, but the story is about her entrapment and her inability to show her true self as her husband Walter (Christoph Waltz, bouncing off the walls) overwhelms her and becomes famous taking credit for her paintings. As a necessity of the story, Walter is louder, more manic, and larger than Margaret, which unfortunately leaves her in the background, even in her own story. Christoph Waltz’s performance is broad, and almost overwhelms the entire movie.
The story also suffers from a strong stance on the character and personality of Margaret that she is having to suppress, which may simply be due to trying to create an accurate and respectful portrayal of a still living figure. For a story that focused so strongly on the effects Walter’s actions took on her, I didn’t feel like I knew her character well enough to know why she stayed with him past the halfway point of the movie. There are hints of the motives of her character, but they are never explored deeply enough to hold up the story.
I will say that I really enjoyed the style and the tone of the movie, and the real story it’s telling is basically worth watching it on its own, because it’s completely insane, but the movie tried to put together the elements of a strong story, and never quite managed it. There is a series of scenes in the film where Walter, passing off Margaret’s paintings as his own, tries to come up with a convincing lie about “why he paints.” The implication is that, since he does not paint, he can never understand the reasons why I painter would have created the Big Eyes paintings. Unfortunately, after watching this film, I’m not sure I could tell you why she painted them either.
The Theory of Everything
The Theory of Everything is a movie that people really want to like. The acting is strong, especially the physical performance by Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking. The story is intensely dramatic- a brilliant scientist is diagnosed with ALS, and instead of dying after two years, goes on to become one of the best known scientists in the world, as his wife struggles with caring for him. The problem? I can’t actually think of another thing it has going for it.
I can’t say that The Theory of Everything is a bad movie, because it isn’t. It tells the story of Stephen Hawking’s wife, and the struggles she faced during their marriage, which both sounds like a good film, and still manages to not be one. Most of the issues I had with the story are caused by the huge amount of time the movie covers. Shortly after we meet our two main characters, Stephen is diagnosed with ALS, they get married, and have a baby together. If the story depends on the audience’s understanding of the central marriage, the way it endures, struggles, and eventually fails, we’re simply not given enough time to understand the characters as they exist together.
The film also has a bit of a gaping hole, in that it barely focuses on Stephen Hawking’s work whatsoever. I normally wouldn’t care from a movie like this, that’s so obviously focused on his personal life primarily, but because we aren’t given much time to get to know him at the beginning, and only see him through his wife’s eyes later, I really didn’t feel like I got to know him much as a character. Similarly, I only got to see the wife through the context of her marriage, which made it seem less like I was watching a story about two real people, and more like I was reading a really bland biography based on newspaper articles.
The Theory of Everything is well made, and there’s nothing to really hate about it, but I didn’t feel like I gained much by watching it. The characters aren’t well defined enough, and the large time jumps between scenes make it hard to even follow the emotional build of the storyline. Watch the movie if you’re interested in biographies in general, but it’s not something I’d tell people to rush out to see.
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