When you hear Tim Burton has made a movie about the bizarre couple responsible for those painfully schticky big eyed waif posters and paintings that were so hot in the ’50’s and ’60’s, you think, “YES! This movie has potential!” And when you hear Burton has cast Christoph Waltz as Walter Keane, who took all the credit for the paintings, and Amy Adams, as his wife Margaret who actually created them, you just might anticipate the quirky comedy of the season. It will come as a great surprise, then, when you realize that Tim Burton fails to deliver.

I suppose all his films can’t be off-center genius. This one is positively mundane. Burton, who is usually Lord of the Delirious Dark in his director’s choices, goes all suburban sunshine on us, and tells a very strange story as if it were an episode of Ozzy and Harriet. Waltz, usually a dramatic genius but here completely miscast, poses and flails and ultimately flops as a talent-free, would-be painter who charms Margaret into marrying him, then totally exploits her work, claiming it as his own. Adams, who dons a perky blonde wig to play Margaret, is given a character written without dimension or depth. Perhaps it’s an intentional statement about how it takes a vacuous person to produce vacuous work, but the cinematic chronicling of her ultimate triumph over her husband denotes respect for the subject matter.

At one point, where the hapless Margaret begins seeing everyone around her as exaggerated eyed children, you think, “finally, we’re veering off into Tim Burton oddball territory.” But then it gets right back on track with the linear story telling and the unimaginative everything. Sadly, this is an unremarkable film about a remarkable situation. Perhaps that’s the problem when many of the subjects involved are still living–you don’t want to be offensive to them or their families and friends. Still, it was done well enough by the filmmakers of The Theory of Everything. With a little more humor and imagination, this could have been a great film. As is, it’s just ho-hum.

Rated PG-13

1 Hour 46 Minutes

And here’s the fascinating real story, as told by Margaret Keane