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Burton films all of this respectfully, with no fuss or fanfare, and except for one hallucinatory sequence in a grocery store when every customer stares mournfully at Margaret with hugely exaggerated eyes, the director plays it straight. There is an intermittent voiceover, given by a gossip columnist who was interested in Walter Keane; the voiceover helpfully (and simplistically) explains that "women didn't just leave their husbands in those days."

Christopher Waltz has been excellent in many films, with a knack for portraying ambition mixed with a smilingly callous approach to getting what he wants. With Walter Keane, Waltz telegraphs to us from the first moment we meet the character: "I am an unscrupulous individual. I am very sketchy. I am up to no good." Waltz can't resist "playing the villain", doing so with such relish that he has nowhere to go but into caricature. The performance ratchets up and up and up, until finally he is a complete maniac, culminating in a scene where he tries to burn his house down, with his wife still in it. Waltz is obviously enjoying himself very much in the role, but maybe too much.

There's a feminist undercurrent to "Big Eyes," a sense that someone like Margaret Keane didn't have the language to even understand how dominated by men she was, how much she enforced her own helplessness. When Walter tells her that art by women just doesn't sell as well, Margaret doesn't like it, but she acquiesces. She thinks he's probably right. And he is right. She is in a very lonely position, shutting out her friends, her daughter. Walter has become her only conduit to the outer world.

Scrrenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also wrote "Ed Wood," "The People vs. Larry Flynt," and "Man on the Moon", are clearly interested in popular art—art that is perhaps scorned by the mainstream establishment, but still speaks to a broad and diverse group of people. Margaret Keane's work was hated by the insiders of the art world; they hated Walter Keane's hard-liner promotional tactics; they hated that paintings lacking their stamp of approval were selling like hot-cakes. This attitude is personified in the film by Jason Schwartzman's snobby San Francisco gallery owner and influential art critic John Canaday (played by Terence Stamp), who described the big-eyed waifs as "atrocities." Tim Burton, and his screenwriters, have a lot of affection for Margaret Keane's work, they seem to take Andy Warhol's position (Warhol's quote opens the film). It's an interesting question: who gets to say what is and is not art? Should popularity be equalled with bad? "Big Eyes" has a lot of fun with the established art world's reaction to the big-eyes. When Schwarzman's character, who despised the big-eyes, learns of Walter Keane's fraud, he murmurs to himself, "Who would want to take credit?"

"Big Eyes" is full of fascinating questions about the meaning of art, the concept of popularity, and what it means to develop a huge audience. Back to Warhol: whether or not something is seen as "good" by an expert is irrelevant if so many people like it. The cultural gatekeepers will always be apoplectic in such a situation. "Big Eyes" is not a major film from Tim Burton, and it has some tonal issues, but one can see why he was drawn to such material. In a way, it's a very personal film.

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