Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: Clint Eastwood Part 1

The Last Man Standing

It is a typical image in the films of Clinton Eastwood, Jr., actor-director: one man facing a ring of guns trained on him, and through skill and sheer force of will (and quick editing) taking down their ranks until he is the last man standing. It is The Big Joke in the Sergio Leone horse operas* and the tradition continued when Eastwood or others held the directorial reins. In Joe Kidd, Eastwood drives a train through a building to get "the drop" on a bunch of targets. Don Siegel put a more realistic spin on it in his first Dirty Harry movie, making it a faster-paced urban assault, kin to the big shoot-out of High Noon, and Eastwood showed how the psychological element did the trick in his Oscar-winning "Best Picture," Unforgiven. Gran Torino, which, at the time, Eastwood said was his final acting bow, ended the conceit, showing that the trick only works in the movies (but not that particular movie) turning that confrontation into a sacrifice for the greater good.

There's one thing about the Eastwood style—economy. He rarely exceeds his scheduled shooting days or his budget, frequently saving his investors money. His crew is usually the same, although, typically, he has survived many of his frequent collaborators like the Surtees family of cinematographers, composer Jerry Fielding and his long-time production designer Henry Bumstead. His early films are full of flashy zooms, rack-focus tricks and other director star-turns, but he's lost those. In style, he became more like Don Siegel than Sergio Leone, with just a hint of Samuel Fuller—just cantankerous enough to irk people. But, on-set he's prepared, quiet, rarely directing his actors but collaborating with them, and rather than shouting a blustery "Action!" to start filming, he'll merely say "When you're ready." He's beloved by actors and he's worked with a lot of the best, winning them frequent awards, young and old. He is a throw-back to the business days of film-making, when art would come from challenges, rather than unlimited budgets full of waste. And with no intention of quitting making films, he's still standing, the last of his breed.


Play Misty for Me (1971) Most directors cut their teeth on the horror genre. As an actor, Eastwood started out in Revenge of the Creature (1955). But as a director, he started with this homicidal maniac/slasher movie, about a stalker (Jessica Walter, hysterically over the top) who obsessively makes requests and makes demands on a jazz DJ (Eastwood) in sunny Carmel. Music has always been important to Eastwood, and here, he based an interminable montage around Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," (which subsequently became a huge hit, prompting as many requests to radio stations as Misty), and a long sequence done vérité style at the Monterey Jazz Festival. There is a cameo by friend and mentor Don Siegel, in case the lad got himself in trouble, but first-timer Eastwood brought it in on-time and under budget. Despite the jerks in pace, it's an interesting time-capsule of 70's soft-jazz California style, and as a thriller, more cunning and to the knife-point than the similar Fatal Attraction. It proved so popular to audiences that its distributor, Universal, despite their low expectations, had to extend runs of it to please theater owners.

Almost as a good luck talisman, Eastwood used his friend and director Don Siegel
in his first movie.

High Plains Drifter(1973) If Play Misty for Me reminds one of Don Siegel's unpretentious directorial style, High Plains Drifter recalls Sergio Leone's formal and stylized spaghetti westerns that made Eastwood a star. Out of a simmering, shimmering desert landscape, a stranger "with no name" comes to town, and begins to disrupt things, going so far as to paint the town red...literally, taking pity on the small and disadvantaged, and killing or humiliating the ones who wield power.

It's a revenge story, with just a shade of the spooky, as it's indicated The Stranger is the vengeful spirit of one of the town's lynching victims. The author was Ernest Tidyman, who was a "hot" screenwriter at the time having written both Shaft and the Academy Award-winning The French Connection.

Breezy (1973) And now for something completely different. The story of a May-December romance between a 19 year old hippie Edith Alice "Breezy" Breezerman (Kay Lenz) and a middle aged real estate salesman (William Holden) was written by Play Misty For Me scribe Jo Heims, a friend of Eastwood's (and as Misty made a lot of money, the team was a good bet), and although it tries to feel "with it" it's basically an apologia for dirty old men. It gave Eastwood the director a chance to work with a big star and a great actor (and also Kay Lenz), without having to get in front of the camera himself, and he mercifully keeps it from getting too icky by photographing the love scenes in silhouette. One of those movies that hasn't aged well, mostly because the argot isn't as much of  "a gas" as it used to be, and Lenz doesn't feel natural saying it. Holden, however, can mine gold from tin-ear dialogue. Eastwood's junior film has no action (although Lenz is very naked for a chunk of it), so it had no appeal for his loyal action audiences. And as a director, he makes a few missteps that the studio seems to have taken pains to correct—like a misaligned angle on Holden that was evidently blown up from a wider Eastwood shot. Despite the tinkering, the studio showed no confidence in it and dumped the film in theaters with little promotion (what there was merely accentuated Eastwood's role behind the scenes).** When the two characters go see a movie on a date, the movie they see is High Plains Drifter.

The Eiger Sanction (1975) "Trevanian's"*** best-selling tongue-in-cheek spy novel was an odd choice for director Eastwood, but became one of necessity. Universal wanted him to star, but finding a director to ascend the Devil's spire in Monument Valley (where the training exercises were filmed) and the actual ascent of the Eiger was more problematic. But, just as he took over directing duties for Don Siegel in the ladder-truck rescue sequence of Dirty Harry, Eastwood did double-duty in the climbing sequences, making them even more impressive because it's obvious he is there and doing the stunts himself—something that couldn't be said for Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise when they made similar climbing moves. But, where Trevanian's humor is subtle and a little wise, it has all the panache of a sledge-hammer in the film. It's a particularly ugly exercise in stereotypes and subterfuge, that plays a bit more sluggishly on-screen. It would be Eastwood's last film directing for Universal, which, because it always seemed like a television studio masquerading as a film company, only humored their big star's ambitions. With its next film, Eastwood's production company, Malpaso would set up shop at Warner Brothers. Nice score by John Williams, written about the same time as his classic Oscar-winning score for Jaws.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Warner Brothers signed onto a Philip Kaufman film, but it was hi-jacked by Eastwood (his Malpaso Films production company was paying for it, anyway), and Eastwood might have seen the potential to control a truly good film. The story of a Civil War berserker warrior out for revenge against the Union Army that slaughtered his family starts out as your standard "dig two graves" story (albeit against Union troops and allying with threatened Natives) and turns into an odd story of one man's rejuvenation, as he finds himself, through no fault of his own—and certainly not for trying—becoming the patriarch of an odd new family of outcasts and victims. One of the two films (the other being Little Big Man) where Chief Dan George's odd combination of Native dignity and comic straight-man's timing made an indelible portrait far beyond Hollywood stereotyping. First movie with Sondra Locke, who would, with this film become a part of the Eastwood Stock Company (along with Bill McKinney and, later, Geoffrey Lewis). Eastwood starts out with some fancy rack-focus shots, but settles down and keeps the story...and the juggling between dead-pan comedy and ruthless action...moving amazingly smoothly. Eastwood's favorite film of his.

The Gauntlet (1977) What seemed like a minor exploitation film after Josey Wales looks like something more with the passage of time. The film establishes a long-time Eastwood trademark opening—the dawn helicopter shot over an urban landscape (in this case, Phoenix, Arizona backed by an Art Pepper-John Faddis led jazz score) that establishes a moral blank slate, something that the swooping shots of Carmel in Play Misty for Me, didn't seem to contain. It's an odd combination of a potty-mouthed Tracy-Hepburn style duel of the sexes**** with the plot of Richard Donner's later 16 Blocks, but played out in the desert wasteland between Las Vegas and Phoenix. Boozing detective Ben Shockley (Eastwood) is sent to Vegas to retrieve a key witness in an influence trial only to find that there's a betting line of 50 to 1 against hooker "Gus" Malley (Sondra Locke) making it to testify. None too subtle in the acting and writing departments, the film has a surrealist glee in putting the mis-matched couple in all sorts of contained vehicles that are then chewed up by police-fire that recall the LAPD's 1974 overkill of the SLA's Headquarters in Compton. Maybe it's a metaphor for Locke and Eastwood feeling like they were taking too much heat over their backstage affair, but at times the movie is almost giddy with gun-fire. It presaged Eastwood's experiments with deliberate comedy with the "Every Which Way" Bakersfield flicks and his exploration of darker characters in the 80's. The two would come together somewhat uneasily in his next film.

The exquisite poster—also somewhat tongue in cheek—was painted by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta.****

So...why did they call it The Gauntlet?

Bronco Billy (1980) Endearing, if troubling film to his fan-base. Eastwood's Bronco Billy character is a thing of fantasy, sort of the way Raymond Chandler described Alan Ladd—"He's a ten year old boy's view of a hero." That's the point here. Billy lives in a black and white world of doing the right thing and setting an example for "his little pard's," as a psychological rejection of reality. And his traveling band of mis-fits and outsiders are a family whose wagons are encircled against a world of compromised values and predatory business. Inside the circus tent, they're safe from an encroaching outside world. They're heroes. Outside, they're draft-dodgers and cripples and un-employables. Even Bronco Billy is humiliated in a face-down. Audiences rejected this compromise of the traditional larger-than-reality Eastwood character. But those who saw Bronco Billy and enjoyed it, saw the inklings of a lighter Eastwood characterization, weaker, gentler but just as resolute even in the face of impossible odds. Because someone's gotta stand up "for the little pard's."

Firefox (1982) Pretty lunk-headed action film where director Eastwood got to experiment with a form of science fiction and the new science of special effects (Star Wars' John Dykstra supervised the FX scenes). The story, however, is behind the times with a soon-to-be out-of-date Cold War espionage story of a one man hijacking crew who smuggles himself behind the Iron Curtain to steal Russia's new thought-control guidanced stealth plane. Once he's in the thing, though, the inexperienced pilot has to dogfight with a bunch of experienced Russian MIG's—no easy task, especially when the plane only answers directional commands...that are thought in Russian.

Okay. Now, stop and think about that for a moment. "...that are thought in Russian." Any specific accent?  Nyet, not too convincing, but Clint learned about computer guided motion-control FX and managed to bring the film in under budget, tricky to do with special effects.

Honkytonk Man (1982) One of those personal Eastwood projects that didn't sync up with the public taste is due for a re-appraisal, but has long been considered a low point in Eastwood's career. Actually, he was beginning a renaissance that the "Dirty Harry" movies and Bakersfield comedies couldn't have prepared the public for. Honkytonk Man is a showcase for Eastwood's interest in music and stretching his skills as director and actor in other fields than action/adventure. Maybe Eastwood the Man was also thinking about the family he abandoned for Sondra Locke, for this was the first of a few Eastwood films where his kids were major players in them. Young Kyle Eastwood plays the nephew of tubercular singer-songwriter Red Stovall, asked to audition for The Grand Ole Opry at the height of the Depression. Too sick to drive, the nephew and Uncle know this may be both of their only chances to escape crippling poverty, so with Grampa (John McIntire) in tow it turns into a picaresque road movie with a slew of great character actors in early parts, like Barry Corbin, Matt Clark, Verna Bloom, and Tracey Walter as well as country-western stars Porter Wagoner, Ray Price, David Frizzell, and the last appearance on film of country star Marty Robbins. A lot depends on your view of Eastwood's singing voice—the character is tubercular after all—but walk into it with no pre-conceptions and you might be surprised.

Sudden Impact (1984) If HonkyTonk Man was an admirable failure at the box-office, it made no appreciable dent in Eastwood's popularity at the box-office or in popular culture. Indeed, this film, the only "Dirty Harry" film directed by Eastwood himself became ubiquitous for one single line of dialogue. In one of the typical "Last Man Standing" scenes in the "Dirty Harry" series, Inspector Harry Callahan is left standing off against a criminal with a hostage. "Go ahead." says Eastwood laconically. "Make my day." So emblematic of cock-sure, if clueless, bravado, even President Ronald Reagan used it in his "negotiations." A second-rate "Harry," Sudden Impact fulfilled audience expectations while just avoiding the giddy excesses of the later The Dead Pool. Sondra Locke plays yet another rape victim seeking revenge. Harry has his loyalties tested and gets a great big new gun. One of the characters is rumored to be based on a troublesome star. And Albert Popwell, the actor who was asked "Do you feel lucky, punk?" in the original, moves up the acting ladder this go 'round to become one of Harry's unfortunate partners.

Pale Rider (1985) Highly reminiscent of High Plains Drifter, but with a more rustic feel and a high mountain location (in both Idaho and California),  Pale Rider features another "Man with No Name" to shift the balance or power in a town dominated by a mining magnate (Richard Dysart) and a fascist posse of lawmen, led by the star of TV's "Lawman" John Russell. The main difference between HPD and Pale Rider—Eastwood's direction has become so self-assured that the film looks great and the director gets great performances out of Dysart, Michael Moriarty, and Carrie Snodgress and young Sydney Penny (who became a soap opera fixture). The other difference is Eastwood's Pale Rider is a bit less obtuse when it comes to the origins of the character. Dispensing with flashbacks, it's implied that "Preacher" is a ghost, the "pale rider" which is Death, come to set things right. If so, it is the first unambiguously spiritual film Eastwood has ever made until his next directorial effort...for television. Pale Rider was nominated for the "Palme D'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival—the first Eastwood film so recognized. It would not be the last.

Next Time: Clint Eastwood, Part 2-"Actor/Director" to "Director/Actor"

* That scene is, as a lot of the film, a direct steal from Kurosawa's Yojimbo.

** Universal tries to make some hay from a film it had no confidence in, by putting Eastwood's face prominently in the poster, although Eastwood is only seen (barely) as an extra.

*** "Trevanian" was the pen-name of communications professor Dr. Rod Whitaker, who wrote an eclectic series of novels, ranging from spy spoofs to historical fiction between 1973 and his death in 2005. "The Eiger Sanction" and "The Loo Sanction" were Trevanian's first books, featuring an art professor who moonlights as a government assassin, Dr. Jonathon Hemlock. In the "Eiger" book he is recruited by the CII and its monstrous albino overseer to eliminate a climber on a planned assault of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps. By turns whimsical and hard-boiled, the book was a best-seller. But the movie version was dismissed by the author as "vapid."

**** Glenn Kenny sees it more as Eastwood's Frank Capra movie, especially It Happened One Night. Wouldn't argue with that.

***** Here's the Frazetta artwork in all its garish glory.

The Navigator (1924)

The Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, 1924) Give Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton a prop and he would make full use of it.  In the case of The Navigator, the prop is a grand stage—a passenger/cargo ship called the USAT Buford that the comedian utilized stem to stern, with all hands (and tails and all body parts in-between) on deck.

Co-directed by actor Donald Crisp (who has a brief cameo as the portrait of the ship's captain—and, yes, it was used as a "bit"), who, it seemed, was determined to make the film dramatic, it's the story of an awkward young man, the well-to-do Rollo Treadway (Keaton, of course), who is determined to marry the girl of his dreams, the equally inept Betsy O'Brien (Kathryn McGuire), if only she wouldn't reject him as a bad prospect. 

Of course, she does.

To mend his broken heart, Rollo decides to go, by himself, on the honeymoon cruise to Hawaii he'd intended to take his bride.  Complications (as they are wont to do) arise and as Fate and luck would have it, both Betsy and Rollo are stranded on the same ship as it is set adrift by spies out to sea in the Pacific Ocean, carrying (what co-screenwriter Jean Havez called) "the most helpless people in the world" on a pilot-less ocean-going vessel.

It is always a personal joy to watch Buster Keaton and his films, especially when he is the captain of his fate (that is, behind the camera—his characters are usually victims of fate, despite their abilities, however clumsy or clever, to deal with it). With an entire ship as his stage, he can be depended to find a wealth of comedic possibilities throughout, whether it's set in the ship's galley, cockpit, fo'csle or funnel. Everything is fair game. Everything is a potential prop, and Keaton's ability to make the most of it...and display his amazing body of stunt-work...infuses his films with fun and not a little awe at what he can do, seemingly effortlessly.

Magic lantern presentation of secret desire—
a poignant visual joke that lasts all of two seconds

The fact is the ship is under its own power and Keaton and McGuire are merely passengers (although they could be considered cargo), irrelevant to the path it is taking, carried along aimlessly.  And so complete are the comedic opportunities aboard ship, it takes a considerable amount of screen-time to introduce an element not to be found on-board to complicate things.  That takes the form of an island inhabited by cannibals (near Catalina??) that provides a fourth quarter filled with threatening boarding parties, loose cannons on deck and a wild escape and rescue by a leaky dinghy.  Combatants on all sides end up being all wet.

A comment, ladies and gentlemen, of the profligacy and privilege
of the wealthy as it appeared in 1924.
It's also a funny joke.

There are wonderful sequences throughout, including a deep-sea diving adventure (that's less than water-tight), some sleepless episodes with a "ghost," a hapless cooking and dining sequence, and—my favorite—an extended (and increasingly paced) run around the ship where the two castaways—suspecting someone else is aboard—chase each other, missing seeing the other by split-seconds, between decks, through doorways, around the promenade; the choreography is precise and intricate with mounting tension as the search becomes faster and more desperate.  It only increases the comedy when the meeting happens and all that effort snaps.  That compounded escalation is only one of the reasons I enjoy every opportunity to watch one of the films of Buster Keaton.

Problem: how do you climb a ladder with one hand?
Or do you drop the girl?
Decisions, decisions...

If you have an hour, The Navigator is embedded below.

Into the Woods

Not as Grim (as Grimm Can Be)
or
The Family That Slaps Together Raps Together

Rob Marshall's output as a director has been problematic. He managed to make a fully fleshed-out version of the stage schematics of Chicago, then followed up his multi-Oscar-winner by making a mess of Memoirs of a Geisha, then only managed to sporadically liven up a film version of Nine (but without evoking any ghosts of Fellini, on whose work the whole thing is based). One looked at the plans set photos for Into the Woods and wondered if Marshall was making it or Tim Burton.

However he got there, it was the right path, because Into the Woods, his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1987 Grimm fairy tale mash-up may be his best movie ever after. Marshall's directorial touch post-Chicago has been mostly heavy-handed and cheerless, and only occasionally lightening up in musical moments. Here, the film doesn't flag whenever the music stops.

Blunt and Corden practice their baby-holding techniques

The "real world" of Into the Woods is a fairy tale land where anything is possible...in the confines of one village. There, various stories from the imaginations of The Brothers Grimm intersect to form one story of wishes coming true and going horribly (horribly) wrong and the resulting consequences. In the village is a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt) who cannot conceive a child due to the curse of a witch (Meryl Streep) owing to the previous generation's actions. There is also a little girl (Lilla Crawford) in a red cape who is on her way to visit her invalid grandmother, a matriarchal family of women (Christine Baranski, Lucy Punch and Tammy Blanchard) who regularly abuse the runt of the litter (Anna Kendrick), a rather dull-witted farmer's son (Daniel Huttlestone), tasked by his mother (Tracey Ullman) with selling the family cow, and the sister of the baker (Mackenzie Mauzy) (abducted by that same witch) who is locked away in a tower with nothing to do but let her hair grow.

Lilla Crawford as "Red"

The story's machinations and complications take place in a nearby woods which are lovely, dark and Johnny Depp'd (he plays the Big...well, smallish...Bad Wolf), with a crowded thicket of swamps, quick-sand, dangerous cliffs, ghosts and spirited trees, crowding the path to the castle of the King who has two charming, handsome, and extraordinarily dramatic princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) who must have inherited the trait from their Mother's side.

Anna Kendrick as Cinderella

The music and songs are by Stephen Sondheim (slightly toned down by the Disney studio, which produced) who has a fine time mixing and matching rhyming schemes—but with a difference.  Most movie-goers experiencing musical fare (like...Disney...again) have their "tent-pole" songs (called that because they support the structure of the movie with key-points, like tent-poles, roughly one every 15 minutes) expressing emotions in stasis (or "this is what I'm feeling right now").  

"The woods are lovely, dark and Johnny Depp'd"

Sondheim goes a couple steps better as both song-writer and dramatist—his song's catalogue a character's change of emotion or realization, their thought processes more than their emotions, their motivations, not their feelings. Sondheim's songs travel, propelling the story and characters along, not stopping the show to get a song in, and the lyrics are so dexterous and nimble that, if anything, the pace increases, rather than slows for a musical "time-out."

Mauzy as Rapunzel "lets her hair down"

It is Marshall's best film to date—well cast and performed (everybody can sing...and well), nimbly paced and production-designed somewhere on the border between Burtonville and the Gilliam-verse.  It's fairy-tale land, but things can turn pretty Grimm (despite Disney's efforts to homogenize the material*)—one notices early on that there's a lot of face-slapping going between families. Things do not turn out happily ever after, and the consequences are irrevocable, despite some hocus-pocus, bovine resurrections and after-lives.  But, the through-line is the journey from life to myth, the passing of reality into legend, as it should be. Nothing down-beat about that.

Chris Pine does...some...Shatnering...as the Prince

Performances are uniformly excellent and done with verve, but standouts are Streep, Blunt, Depp and Pine (the "Agony" duet is a comic highlight), working with good material that is consistently entertaining and deep, adding extra dimension to the so-familiar words on pages, breathing life and giving voice to old chestnuts and bringing them to full bloom.

* For instance: the Wolf's song "Hello, Little Girl" has some of its more wicked aspects stripped from it, the princes' reprise of "Agony" (which makes them even more fickle) has been cut, and the ultimate fate of Rapunzel (who is given short shrift, anyway) is not even mentioned.  Sondheim did approve the changes (as he did with Burton's film of Sweeney Todd)

Big Eyes

Eyes Wide Shut
or
That Would Be S© Keane

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp* do a trial separation as Burton tears himself away from fantasy/horror territory and out of his comfort zone (which usually produces his best movies). Re-teaming with Ed Wood writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, he tells the story of one of the most popular artists of the 1960's...and the strange story framing the canvas.

I like Burton when he's not in his mock-horror groove. That sensibility still informs his "normal" (non-genre) movies and it gives them a Fellini-esque quality that makes the material rise above the norm. Those rarities like Ed Wood (which is about horror movies) and Big Fish (and not forgetting his two "Batman" movies) are two of his best. Burton is capable of bringing magic to life, a talent not to be dismissed or neglected. That Big Eyes is "based on true events" gives it and its subjects a special quality beyond the mundane. Burton's films, whatever you think of them, are never mundane.

Big Eyes tells the story of Margaret Doris Hawkins (Amy Adams), amateur painter, who would marry Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), who describes himself in a moment of honesty and humility "a Sunday painter." At sidewalk sales in San Francisco, Margaret does charcoal sketches for $2 ($1 if you insist)—she's a single mom trying to scrape by painting designs on baby furniture during the day. Keane does the same sidewalk sales, selling paintings of empty Paris street scenes. He doesn't sell much, but he's a charmer and can keep up a steady stream of salesmanship.   

Watching Margaret draw, he's intrigued by her style of drawing faces with huge, out-sized eyes and notices they do (once in awhile) sell, and that Margaret's output is prodigous. The two have a whirlwind courtship and marry. They combine their efforts to sell their paintings at a local jazz club (when Keane offers the owner—Jon Polito—his services as a painter, he cracks "Sure!  What color you thinkin'?"). Margaret's work begins to sell but his make bupkiss.

Then, something happens. Margaret's paintings start selling at the jazz club. When she drops by to deliver another painting, she finds Walter talking up the paintings as if he were the artist. For him, there's no conflict—she signs them "Keane" and he's Keane.  They're married; she paints and he sells. They share the profits. He attracts the attention of a reporter (Danny Houston) and suddenly, he's the face of the waif paintings. But, at the jazz club at that first inkling of credit-grabbing, a prospective buyer (from the wealthy Olivetti family-makers of typewriters—where are they now?) asks "Who is the artist?"

There is a very long uncomfortable pause...as they stare at him, knowing the truth, Margaret unsure to paralysis. Then Keane jumps in—I am—leaving her holding the new picture, and realizing that she's lost control...of her art, and maybe, her life. 

The Keane empire grows—enough that Walter opens a gallery, selling top dollar for Margaret's waif paintings, while she sits in a corner with her paintings attempting a different style. Meanwhile, posters for the gallery are being ripped off telephone poles, so Keane starts to charge for posters, for prints, and they become a cottage industry for primitive art. All the while, Margaret grows more resentful, less enamored of her art—and begins to hallucinate big eyes in real life.

It's an interesting story (no matter who directed it) focusing on the sacrifices one makes for art...and marriage...or simply comfort. But, the psyche that created those bowling-ball eyed orphans also is a projection of a soul in torment, holding in any objection or protest and reflecting it in those haunted, out-sized eyeballs.

But Margaret Doris Hawkins is no waif. It's another great performance by Amy Adams—tremulous in times of doubt, but worldly-wise in moments of triumph. Burton is well-prepared for stories of outsiders, but Margaret is a bit more normal than the freaks and geeks that generally inhabit his movies. He's less successful at making feminist statements—women are usually supporting characters in his films and the strong ones tend to be villainous. The last time he had a strong female character who stood up for herself was Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman away, way back in Batman Returns, another woman who refused to be victimized. Here, Margaret Keane has society to blame as much as her husband. At a job interview, she's asked if her husband might object to her working, and Walter manages to get away with so much subterfuge because it's a societal given that successful artists are rarely women (stick that in your ram's skull, Georgia O'Keefe).  

But, Burton does not make these points subtly, even if they're set up as background for the story at large.  One can point to Waltz's performance, also, as being none too subtle—it may be his weakest screen appearance in its effectiveness, despite all the energy he puts into it.  Burton suggests things far more effectively with his subtle echoes of Hitchcock, specifically Psycho, that pepper the movie at moments of difficulty for Margaret—stagings, settings that recall the desperation of that movie's characters, and make the situation seem far more insidious.

Margaret Doris Hawkins Keane (McGuire) and Amy Adams

* Depp does a turn as "The Wolf" in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods (directed by Rob Marshall), which takes so much of its style from Burton that one could almost be confused into thinking it was one of his.