“O VILLAIN, villain, smiling, damned villain!… one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

There was a practical reason for studying “Hamlet” as the obligatory foray into Shakespeare for matriculation exams all those years ago. The quote neatly describes not the usurper who has just married his royal brother’s widow, Hamlet’s mum, but Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz).

Walter catches newly divorced Margaret (Amy Adams) on the hop at a Sunday market where his easel, showing Paris street scenes, is alongside hers and where, for a fee, she will paint a child with her trademark attribute – those big dark eyes that became a marketer’s dream in the US half a century ago.

Waltz has made a career playing smiling villains. In Tim Burton’s film, his talent is not as a painter but as a fraudster, telling a nation of picture buyers that he, not Margaret, had painted them.

This is not the place to discuss how between being a painter differs from being an artist. Scott Alexander’s screenplay lets “New York Times” art critic John Canaday (Terence Stamp) do that.

Mass-produced prints made Walter rich. Andy Warhol observed that Margaret’s work must be art because so many people were buying it. Campbell’s soup, anyone?

The film doesn’t overtly explain why Margaret waited a decade to lower the boom on pathetic Walter, ineffectual in all except dishonesty. In the fourth act, a sharp-tongued judge (James Saito) makes the Solomonic order that we’ve been waiting for. Getting there is by and large a worthwhile experience, giving filmgoers much to discuss afterward.

At Palace Electric, Capitol 6 and Dendy