Ant-Man
Directed by Peyton Reed
Opens July 17
Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is a self-effacing ex-con whose superpower is getting really, really small. But despite that promising premise, this ironic Marvel movie fails to truly subvert the played-out superhero genre.
The Act of Killing, documentary director Joshua Oppenheimer’s first film about the 1965 genocide in Indonesia, jump-started a national dialogue about an atrocity that had been a toxic secret for decades. Largely unknown in the rest of the world, the killings were actively celebrated in Indonesia, where the perpetrators, who are still in charge of the government, described their gruesome deeds in heroic and triumphant terms. But as impressive as that was, it is not the most extraordinary thing about the film. After something much more transformational than merely revealing buried truths or eliciting the easy sympathy of moviegoers for victims from a far-off time and place, Oppenheimer sought out perpetrators, not victims, to tell the story of the genocide, inviting them to reenact their crimes for the cameras. It is deeply unsettling to watch mass murderers matter-of-factly act out some of their more horrific deeds, often enlisting terrified locals to reluctantly reenact the tortures, rapes and murder they are still traumatized by. It is even more disturbing to get to know the perpetrators well enough to see ourselves in them.
In The Look of Silence, the second of his films about the genocide, Oppenheimer switches to a victim’s point of view.
10.000 KM
Directed by Carlos Marques-Marcet
Opens July 10 at IFC Center
The 23-minute-long shot that opens 10.000 KM is an unshowy tour-de-force that accomplishes its aim with impressive economy, introducing us to an attractive young couple and setting up their coming separation without ever feeling contrived or expository. It starts with Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer) in mid-fuck, capturing the intensity of their physical connection and the teasing ease of their banter as well as the important fact that they’re trying to get pregnant. Then they get out of bed and the camera follows them through their cosy Barcelona apartment as their comfortable morning routine is disrupted by big news: Alex has been offered a year-long photography residency in LA. Initially supportive, then resentful, Sergi sulks while Alex apologizes, tries to justify her desire to have a rewarding career as well as a family, and finally concedes to Sergi’s wishes. By the time he relents, urging her to go, we have a visceral sense of their dynamics.
When Alex and Sergi’s relationship goes long-distance, the film switches to short scenes with frequent cuts to mirror the change in their relationship. But it continues to focus solely on the couple and to show them almost entirely inside their apartments. Those parameters may have been chosen partly to minimize the cost of the film, which director Carlos Marques-Marcet shot on the cheap. But they also keep the focus on the relationship, and on the technology that both keeps the two close and pulls them apart.
Frequent texting, occasional phone calls, and lots of Skyping initially give Alex and Sergi the illusion of living together, kibbitzing as they do domestic chores or falling asleep while gazing at each other’s faces on their laptops. But a sense of melancholy and increasing distance soon seeps in through the cracks, surfacing in her plaintive request that they jump-start a stalled Skype session by talking about “something other than our relationship” or his pique when she drunk-Skypes him giddily, eager to show off her new salsa moves, and forgets to ask about an important exam he took the day before—and failed. The mechanical limitations of the technology can be frustrating too, as their images on each other’s screens freeze, break up into abstract collections of pixilated bits, or disappear altogether with a sad “whoosh.” These failures feel realistic while also functioning as metaphors for the gap between them that, once opened, just keeps getting wider.
The final shot plays over “Veinte Anos,“ a beautiful song about the pain two lovers experience after one falls out of love with the other. With its poignant delicacy and respect for both parties’ feelings, the ballad is a fitting end to a tenderly insightful modern romance.
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Directed by Liz Garbus
Opens June 26
Even fans of Nina Simone will likely learn some new things about her in What Happened, Miss Simone?, and those who had never heard her name will have a hard time forgetting it after seeing this slow-burning documentary.
The Japanese Dog
Directed by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu
May 21–27 at MoMA
The Japanese Dog has the look of a thoughtful arthouse character study, with its generally still camera, long, deliberately paced takes, and habit of artfully framing characters through doors or windows to make a painterly tableau of quiet, everyday actions. But while classics of this genre, like Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, weight quotidian household routines and family relationships with great meaning and suspense by laying bare the emotional fault lines underlying the status quo, The Japanese Dog never quite cracks the surface.
A recent widower who lost everything in a flood that swept away much of his village, Costache Muldu (Victor Rebengiuc) is emotionally shut down when we first see him, deflecting the kindly solicitations of his neighbors as he methodically gathers up supplies and carts them to his sparely furnished new home. Then his long-estranged son Ticu (Serban Pavlu) arrives from Japan to memorialize his mother, bringing a wife (Kana Hshimoto) and son (Toma Hashimoto) Costache has never met, and the older man’s reserve dissolves into unconditional love and sweetness.
The minimalistic dialogue lays out the basics of Costache’s dilemma: his newfound family won’t stay in Romania with him, but they want him to move to Japan with them. Medium and long shots (close-ups are so rare that we are about half an hour into the movie before we get a good look at his face) situate Costache in relationship to his environment as he works his land, strides purposefully here or there to find what he needs, or interacts with friends he has presumably known all his life, driving home how thoroughly he is integrated into this place. At the same time, we see his love for his family in shots like one where the camera perches just behind his shoulder to watch with him as his daughter-in-law, framed by an open door, lovingly puts his grandson to bed down the hall.
The sparseness of the dialogue feels realistic and bracingly unsentimental. But, combined with the paucity of close-ups and low lighting (Costache has been living by candlelight since the flood) that make it impossible most of the time to see Costache’s face, the movie’s long silences leave us to guess at what Costache is thinking or feeling. And so, when he picks up his suitcase and gets into a cab at the end, I didn’t know whether he was just visiting his son or leaving home to move in with him—and I didn’t much care.
One of the best movies at last month’s Tribeca Film Festival, Slow West, which opens in New York on May 15, is an accomplished, original Western by first-time feature filmmaker John Mclean (formerly a member of the Beta Band). In it, young Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his guide (Michael Fassbender) strike out to find a young woman named Rose. Shot in New Zealand and written and directed by a Scot, it looks at the American West through what Mclean calls “a European point of view.”
There’s a lot going on in this movie, but one of the main themes is how many different cultures came together to create the United States—from south of the border, from Africa, from all over Europe and more—and how the Native Americans who were here to begin with were shut out of that process. What made you want to focus on that part of our history?
I traveled around America a lot when I was younger, and I met a lot of Americans who said, “Oh, my grandfather was European.” So I decided to write it from a European point of view. Then I started reading up on the story of the West, and it’s a lot more tragic than all these Western movies tell it.
Why did you want to make a Western?
I think it goes back to my love of traveling America, and I used to love Westerns when I was a kid. I liked the idea of doing a forest Western, not a town Western. I thought it would be cheap, because you just had to have the right setting and then dress up people. And I didn’t want a lot of extras. No one was an extra in this film. Everyone in it had a backstory.
How did you do your research? Did you read historical materials to find out how things really were, or watch a lot of Westerns to see how they’ve been depicted, or both?
Everything. I watched every Western possible—in order to avoid the clichés, really. I was inspired by Westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and also some classics like Shane and High Noon. When it came to books, I read the Little House on the Prairie series, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain. Writers who were writing at the time, which I think is the most sensible thing to do.
I don’t think of Mark Twain as writing about the West.
He does in Roughing It, which is about his travels across the country. It reads like a Western.
Payne [a bandit played by Ben Mendelsohn] has a woman and a couple of young orphans he picked up along the way in his gang. Was it not too unusual for outlaw gangs to include women and children, or did you make that part up?
When you start writing, things sort of happen inevitably: you think, in that situation, what would logically happen next? So Payne would come along next and pick up the two kids [after they were orphaned]. Sometimes people would fall by the side of the road [on the Western frontier], and someone would pick them up. There was a great film about that a couple years ago called Meek’s Cutoff.
It’s interesting that you’ve mentioned McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Meek’s Cutoff, because I thought of them both while watching Slow West. All three movies share a kind of modern sensibility and a feminist point of view. Rose, your female love interest, has her own motivations and skills and relationships, and Jay’s love for her is completely unrequited, as we learn early on. That complexity and female autonomy makes it feel different very modern at the same time that it feels authentically old.
I completely didn’t want a damsel in distress, which is something you see even in movies coming out this year. Meek’s Cutoff reminded me that sometimes men bring trouble to the woman and women are forced to take things into their own hands to clean it up. That was definitely what happened to the Rose character.
You used to be a musician. Are you still, or have you switched full-time to film?
I don’t think of myself as a musician who’s making movies now. I think of myself as an artist and filmmaker who was in a band for a while. I studied art—my first love was painting and drawing. I was a musician mainly because my friends were all in bands, so I joined a band. I was really interested in making music videos for the band.
You obviously have a talent for attracting talent. Michael Fassbender stars not only in Slow West but also in your last two films, both of which were shorts. I read that he wanted to work with you because he saw a short film you had made with some friends. How did he happen to see it, and how did you get him to act in a short?
I got to know Michael’s agent, Conor [McCaughan], through a friend. Michael and Conor are quite close, so they were hanging out and Conor played him one or two things I had on YouTube. So Michael offered his services.
At first, I had just a few hours with him. I made sure he enjoyed it, so I got three days on the next film, and I made sure he enjoyed that too. Each time I worked with Michael he got more involved, kicked around more ideas. I always knew he would be one of the main characters [in Slow West]. I wrote the character of Silas for him. •
The Salt of the Earth, a documentary about photographer Sebastião Salgado, is a trip around the world, including some of its least-visited corners, led by a mesmerizing tour guide. Prior to the film’s New York opening on March 27, we spoke with the film’s co-directors, German great Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Sebastião Salgado’s son.
[To Salgado] Why did you feel the need for someone else to direct this film with you, and why Wim in particular?
Salgado: Actually, my relationship with Sebastião when we started the film was dreadful. I mean it was a complicated father and son relationship, and it didn’t give room for interviewing Sebastião, having free chat with him.
Wim appeared in our life in 2009, and they wanted to do something together, him and Sebastião. And when it started to be possible for me to make a film about my father, it was natural that the first person I think about to help would be Wim, because he wanted to do a film about Sebastião.
Wenders: I didn’t really want to make a film about Sebastião to begin with. I just wanted to get to know the man. For years, in any interview when I was asked “Who is your favorite contemporary photographer?” I always said “Sebastião Salgado.” And eventually I thought, wow, I don’t even know him, and he’s still working. I should try to meet him. But even when I met father and son, there was no thought of a film yet.
[To Salgado] And, you know, I talked your dad out of thinking of a film when at some point he asked me: “Do you think, Wim, there is any other way for me to deal with my photographs of [his latest photo project] Genesis than in a book and an exhibition? Do you think I could somehow put them on a screen, maybe with music or something?” I said, “Don’t! It will end up a slide show and that is not good for you.”
And then I went back and I thought, there is one thing that would allow Sebastião to show his work on a movie screen, and that is his own stories, because he’s such a good storyteller. And I told him that, next time we met. He thought for a while and said, “But I’m going to have to tell them to somebody. Could that be you?” So we all of a sudden thought about it. And as we did so, you were thinking about doing this with your dad.
Salgado: Yes, we had the same intuition. For me, when I started thinking about doing this film, I was following Sebastião on his trips, but it was very clear to me that those trips didn’t say the right things about Sebastião. Sebastião, since I’m a child, every time he comes back home he has stories to tell. He speaks about the world.
Those stories [he tells in the film] in Brazil in 81, with those kids that died that were buried with open eyes, and so many children dying, that was the first time I was confronted with that kind of reality. I was seven at the time, or six. You start realizing that there is more to the world, and it is coming from the voice of your dad, and he’s got so much to tell.
So at some point very early, when I started thinking about this, I thought: If there’s a film, it should be about the stories.
And you thought it would work better for your father to tell the stories to Wim than to you?
Salgado: It was impossible for him to tell the stories to me.
Wenders: Yeah, I think these stories could not have been passed on without someone more objective. And also you were too impatient with your father.
Salgado: Yeah, that’s true, that’s true. I would have interrupted him; we would have had fights; it wouldn’t have worked.
Having Wim was the luckiest thing possible because he’s such a great artist, who’s done so many documentaries. His last before this one, was Pina, which was mind-fucking-blowing! So having Wim on board, it was like, “Wow, guys, this is amazing!”
And actually it was amazing, and I’m going to tell you why. Wim started talking to Sebastião around the table, like we’re doing now, with the photos, covering every angle. And then at some point [we realized] the result was dull, and Wim had an idea that changed the film completely.
Shooting him through the teleprompter.
Salgado: Yeah.
Wenders: By then, we had shot for weeks. The producer thought it was in the can. And then I realized it all had been research, and it only put me in the position that I knew the wealth of his stories, but I also knew we needed to film differently. It was interview situations with me in the shot, conventional situations, you know?
Talking heads.
Wenders: Talking heads, yes. It wasn’t good enough. And it wasn’t good enough not just because I was in the shot, but because with the camera in the shot, Sebastião every now and then got self-conscious. He tells a story and he’s looking at the photos and he’s really getting into the memory, and then he looks up and he looks at me and all of a sudden it becomes an act.
I thought, “What can we do to immerse [him] once more in that time? His journeys are so amazing because he does immerse so much. How can we get back to that point?” And I eventually came up with the idea of the darkroom and the teleprompter and him just alone, facing his photographs, no camera, no Wim Wenders, no sound engineers. He was only looking at his photographs, talking about what he saw in front of him, and while he was doing so he was looking into the camera.
You say no Wim Wenders, but you were behind the camera, weren’t you?
Wenders: Yeah, but he couldn’t see me.
Salgado: Sebastião is surrounded by black backdrops. The camera is going between two of those drops, and between Sebastião and the camera there is this teleprompter – you know, a mirror that you can film through. Wim actually very rarely interviewed Sebastião. He was busy feeding in the photos. The magic, the power of this thing that Wim invented is that Sebastião was isolated from the team completely and was drawing himself into the situation again, living those things that were happening with the people that he had photographed years ago.
Wenders: He was also looking at the camera, without seeing the camera. That’s the thing about the teleprompter. Of course, newscasters have text there. He was alone with his pictures.
I was behind, operating the flow of the pictures. When I realized he had come to the end of this one, I went to the next one. That’s why it was good that we had already talked for weeks, because I knew a little bit about what he would say.
[To Wenders] You have made some wonderful documentaries about artists. The ones I’ve seen—this one, Pina, and The Buena Vista Social Club—are as good as any I know of at showcasing the art itself and also providing insights into the act of creation and the relationship between the artist and his or her life’s work. What it is that draws you to making movies like that?
Wenders: There’s only one impetus with me, and that is to really love something, very much, so that, like a kid, I want to run out and show it to an audience. Pina Bausch’s choreography, to me, was the most beautiful thing ever created on this planet by a single person. What she did moved me so deeply that I thought, “I want to make a film about that. This is so precious I can’t keep it to myself.” And the same thing with the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. It was so intoxicating, so contagious, that I thought, “Wow, how can we make sure that not only a few people listen to this music?” I am interested in spreading a virus.
And the same thing with Salgado. I love his work. I really love it. It means very much to me. And then I realize, I keep talking about this man, in the interviews I have, but I’ve never met him. I have to get to know him. Not make a movie, but get to know him.
When we first met, I didn’t have any idea about the family story. I only found out while we were shooting, and Sebastião and his wife Lelia referred to the forest [the two are replanting millions of trees on the family farm in Brazil where Salgado grew up, after its forests were denuded.] I said, “What is this forest you are talking about?”
[To Salgado:] The film makes it clear that your mother collaborated very closely with your father. She helps choose the subjects of his shoots, she helps curate and promote his work, and it was her idea to rejuvenate the forest. But we see her only very briefly, and never in the same frame with Sebastião, except in a few old still photographs. Why did you decide not to show them together, or to include more of her perspective on the work they’ve done together?
Salgado: We interviewed Lelia a lot. We really tried to put [in] as much of Lelia as we could, but two things happened. One is that Lelia’s interviews weren’t as clear as Sebastião’s were. Also, if you see the film again you’ll realize that, after the first half hour, Sebastião starts speaking about the photos and from this moment on he’s the only voice in the film until the end, about the Terra Institute. Wim comes back a little, but only giving a little information to help the story flow.
We tried to edit it in a different way, but we realized very quickly that this was so powerful that it was impossible to mix it with anything else. And then for the last part of the movie they were interviewed together, but again the stronger part was when they were on their own.
Wenders: And your mom had a general resistance to appearing.
Salgado: That’s true.
Wenders: She was so much used to being the power behind the throne that even when we wanted to shoot her, she was “No no no no; this is not about me.” It was her part in their history to be the eminence grise—how do they say it in English? The driving force behind it.
Salgado: Absolutely.
[To Wenders]: You say in the film that it was a different experience for you to shoot a photographer, partly because he is always shooting you while you’re shooting him. What else about it was different?
Wenders: It was not only that I never filmed a photographer, so I wasn’t quite used to the fact that a photographer is a walking reverse angle who can actually shoot back, but I’ve also never really filmed a storyteller. I think that’s almost more important – not that he was shooting back, and that he had his cameras always with him, except [when he was looking at his photos] for the documentary. That is part of his body language, to have a camera.
[To Salgado] I don’t think I would have actually gotten involved in this film with the two of you if I hadn’t known his capacity to sum up his social, philosophical, financial, economic, psychological knowledge of these people and these situations, to put it to words. Most of the people who make images are not so good at talking about it. And sometimes that’s good; it’s good that some painters can’t talk about their work. It makes them better. But Salgado is different because what he adds is not an interpretation of what we see. He just has all this background. The background is why he went there in the first place, because he researched it and knew so much, and wanted to know so much. That’s why it’s so good to have him talking. That was my reason to say yes to doing this film.
So did it feel more like you were shaping his story than like creating your own?
Wenders: Yes. Yes, absolutely. This was the job at hand.
Salgado: That’s the reason why we came to this film in the first place, both of us. Of all the guys who have been traveling and doing photo-reportage, I think Sebastião is the only one who, when he is confronted with his photos, is not saying how difficult it was to get this angle, how much trouble with the light, etcetera. He speaks about the people who were there and his experiences there.
And his experiences of the world become ours, in a way. I’ve been a fan of his for decades too, and in watching the photos in this film I realized, oh, that’s where I got my understanding of what was happening in Ethiopia, or whatever. It’s like he’s an explorer who goes out and finds things the rest of us would never otherwise encounter, and then shares it with us.
Salgado: That’s his great talent, is that sharing. It’s not just his great black-and-white compositions that make his work so profound. His great talent is that he builds relationships with the people he meets. He is capable of putting his camera in a place that, when you see the photo, you feel that relationship, and that breaks the distance completely. You can’t protect yourself [by] thinking, “Oh, this is far away; those are strangers.”
[To Salgado]: Your parents, especially—or anyhow more publicly—your father, have lived their lives so fully and created such an amazing body of work. Is that an inspiring or an intimidating way to grow up? Or some of each?
Salgado: A bit of both, actually. When I started working, I was a cameraman trying to do documentary. I was 22. I had a son, so I had to work, and the people I was working with were mostly a bit older than me. They all felt that I was there because of my name, and that was very difficult. You know my name is Ribeiro Salgado, I took the Salgado away, so I was Juliano Ribeiro for a while.
Is that your mother’s name?
Salgado: No, that should be, but actually I was born in France so I have my dad’s name only. I needed to, you know, make my own experiences. But actually now, it’s inspiring. I was born into a family that was open to the world. The dinners at home were with people like Wim, Cartier-Bresson, other great photographers—people who had a take on the world that was different, who knew about things, who traveled to verify them. I think it was great, actually. It was very, very lucky.
When my girlfriend got pregnant and I had to find a job, I wanted to do that too. To mediate between historical or important facts and my opinion. It was such a political and such an interesting job to do. And then I confronted so many other cultures all the time, growing up. I benefited from that a great deal.
The connections you drew in the film between what Sebastião shoots and where he grew up were so interesting. They made me wonder why Africa, especially in and around the Sahel, keeps drawing him back. Do you think there is something there that feels like home to him?
Salgado: I think so. Sebastião grew up in a place that was very, very isolated. The place he was born into was a week from the city that you see in the film—a week by horse.
Yeah, that story about him seeing money for the first time when his parents sent him off to school at age 15 was pretty amazing.
Salgado: It is amazing. So for him, it’s [going to that part of Africa] not like going to an underdeveloped country or a hard place. It’s going back to a place that he knows. I think that makes it easier. And the regions are all the same latitudes [as his home in Brazil], so it’s all the same –
Same kind of weather, same vegetation?
Salgado: Same societies, actually. It’s very similar.
How has your relationship with your father changed because of this movie?
Salgado: Listen, when I became a teenager, our relationship got to be very, very distant. When we first traveled together to the Zo’e tribe, I didn’t want to go. He forced me. He wanted me to see these guys. He wanted me to share it. I’d been doing documentary for fifteen years at this point, so I filmed it, but I was afraid we were going to be a Herzog-Kinski kind of situation.
But the Zo’e are so nice that it actually went well. And when I came back from the trip and edited these images, I felt the Genesis project might be something we could film. Everything changed for him when I showed him the little film I had shot. You know, the camera doesn’t lie. He starts crying when he sees those images, because he’s seeing how his son sees him. That’s what opened the door for me to keep filming him as much as possible. Also, I felt that there would be a healing for us, but actually it didn’t happen this way.
The crazy thing is, it happened when I saw those interviews [that Wenders did for the film]. It’s really weird, because I knew those stories, enough to choose the path so we could tell Sebastião’s story. But when I saw him, filmed the way he was filmed and saying it the way he says it to Wim’s camera, man, it was so powerful! All of these things that I think other people feel when they see it, I felt for the first time. And when I met Sebastião again, that was it. We were healed. We became friends.
Wenders: So I was your family therapist. •
Accidental Love
Directed by Stephen Greene
Opens March 20 at the AMC Empire 25
When Alice (Jessica Biel), a naïve young waitress in a small town in Indiana, is shot in the head by a nail gun, her life is upended. Her personality changes in ways that—typical of this tone-deaf film—are supposed to be funny but aren’t, at least not as they’re played out here. Uninsured and unable to afford surgery, she spots a young Congressman, Howard Birdwell (Jake Gyllenhaal) on TV and decides he can provide her and her friends with healthcare coverage. In a trek that’s part Wizard of Oz, part Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, she heads to DC with an unlikely posse: Tracy Morgan, as a man with a prolapsed anus, and Kurt Fuller, as a reverend with a boner pill-induced erection that just won’t quit. Har har.
You can’t help but wonder if David O. Russell, who began directing this movie in 2008 and quit the blighted production two years later (the director’s credit is his pseudonym), could have salvaged Accidental Love if he’d stuck with it. Surely he would have found ways in the editing room to better showcase supporting performances by Beverly D’Angelo, Bill Hader, Paul Reubens and Catherine Keener, all of whom seem to be trying to compensate for underdeveloped characters by overacting. And surely he would not have resorted to hokey things like the oom-pah-pah music behind some of the scenes, or the strenuously “happy” blooper reel the film ends with. But most of the problems with this movie could not have been fixed in post-production.
Everyone keeps talking fast and doing wacky things, as if entropy were the same thing as wit, but all that activity, paired with the tin-eared, subtext-free dialogue, only feels manic, sometimes borderline hysterical. Birdwell encourages Alice to cry by telling her “It’s like a fantastic number two,” and he declares his devotion to his constituency by saying he loves “hearing the people, smelling the people.” And the wide-eyed, broad acting style adopted by nearly all the actors makes them—particularly Biel and Gyllenhaal—look as juvenile as they sound. The best thing you can say about this hot mess is that is makes you appreciate how difficult it must be to make the controlled chaos of a good screwball comedy look so effortless.
Gangs of Wasseypur
Directed by Anurag Kashyap
Opens January 16 at The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A cheeky repudiation of Bollywood tradition, director-cowriter Anurag Kashyap’s gangster saga is a little bit Tarantino, a little bit Coppola, a little bit Scorsese, and ultimately all his own. The two-part, five-hour-plus Gangs of Wasseypur charts the bloody rise and fall of three generations of the gangster Khan family while providing a crash course in Indian politics from shortly before independence to the present.
Big Eyes
Directed by Tim Burton
Opens December 25
Director Tim Burton and the story of Margaret and Walter Keane, a tale of extreme weirdness hidden under the manicured surface of two middle-class American lives, were made for each other. There’s even something Burtonesque about the Keane paintings that give the film its title: portraits of children with sad, deadpan faces and eyes so huge and flat that one of the film’s characters compares them to “big stale jellybeans.” After all, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice or Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands as Keane kids in Goth getups. But this “based on true events” tale is a Burton film without much Burton; its costumes, settings and sometimes on-the-nose dialogue all disappointingly straightforward.
