I've been spending this weekend at Maltinfest, a film fest run by my longtime pal Leonard Maltin, his wife Alice and their daughter Jessie. There are interesting films being shown and at least as much fun as watching them is hanging out in the lobby, chatting with other attendees.
The premise of the event is to show movies — mostly from the last few decades — that Leonard thought deserved more attention than they got when they were released. A fine example would be Big Eyes, a film which totally eluded my notice when it came out at Christmas of 2014. Directed by Tim Burton and produced and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, it's the story of Walter and Margaret Keane. He became famous for paintings of little, tiny children with big, sad eyes…but the secret was that he didn't paint them. She did.
Amy Adams played Margaret. Christoph Waltz played Walter. And as fine as Ms. Adams was, I thought Mr. Waltz did a stunning job of playing a guy who starts out as rather lovable and charming…but as the film progresses, you increasingly want to leap into the screen and beat the ever-lovin' crap out of him. It's really an amazing performance and how it didn't get nominated for every award in the book is beyond me. Maybe some voters felt it's not that big a challenge to come across as The Worst Person in the World when you're playing The Worst Person in the World.
Walter Keane really was, seizing the credit for his wife's work — at first, he claimed, for marketing reasons. He was a better interview and at the time, The Art World didn't take women seriously. But it's quickly apparent that he loves the spotlight a little too much; that being hailed as one of the leading artists on the planet is just too, too thrilling for a guy with no artistic talent of his own. Things turn very ugly and I'd probably be doing you a disservice if I told you much more than that.
Sitting there in the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, I was struck by many things but one biggie was how much I enjoy seeing a movie without knowing anything about it — in this case, apart from a few brief introductory remarks from Leonard. I had not seen any clips of this film. I had not seen its stars on talk shows discussing it. I had not read reviews or seen a trailer…or anything. And while I had a vague sense of where it was going from having read a bit about the Keanes before the film was made, the movie surprised me a couple of times, turning right when I was expecting it to make a hard left.
I really don't get why folks at Comic-Con rush to panels that promise a "first look" at an upcoming movie they really want to see. When the advance trailer for Stan & Ollie was posted online, several dozen of you wrote to tell me it was there and to ask what I thought of it. I'm sure you meant well but since I wanted to see the film, I very much didn't want to see scenes from it out of sequence and out of context. And I really didn't want to form any sort of opinion on it based on snippets. For much the same reason, when I read a murder mystery, I don't start by peeking at the ending and finding out whodunnit. I want to follow the itinerary the author laid out for me or any reader.
After the screening of Big Eyes, Leonard interviewed Alexander and Karaszewski, mainly in three areas. One was the long, maddening struggle to get the film made. Despite all their success and credits, it still took around twelve years and might not have happened at all. Another topic was getting the rights to the story from Margaret Keane. She's still alive but that troglodyte of a husband of hers is gone. Lastly and of greatest interest was discussing how faithful to the truth the film is. If its writers are to be believed, it's pretty faithful.
Anyway, I'd write more but I'm heading back to Maltinfest. Maybe I'll see some of you there.