There’s no shortage of biopics about artistic geniuses. In
fact, the famed artist at the center of “At Eternity”s Gate,” Vincent van Gogh,
served as the subject of another filmic tribute (the striking animated feature
‘Loving Vincent”) just last year. But director Julian Schnabel (“The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly”) creates something special with his impressionistic,
meditative portrait of the mercurial painter.
As
a man, van Gogh (played here by the great Willem Dafoe) has always remained
something of a mystery, and Schnabel keeps that mystery intact, never seeking
to explain the painter’s genius, simply wishing to imagine that talent at work.
Schnabel
focuses on the painter’s fraught later years, during a prolific period spent in
the small town of Arles, France. We gradually get a sense of him through
episodic snapshots of his tender relationship with his beloved brother Theo
(Rupert Friend), who offers as much financial and emotional support as he can.
We also see his friendship with contemporary Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), as the
two engage in a philosophical dialogues about their diverging techniques and
the nature of art.
Van
Gogh’s unconventional and innovative use of color and form allowed him to
create landscapes and portraits like no one else. In the process he confounded
both the public and the artistic establishment at the time. In one of the
film’s best scenes, he talks with a priest (Mads Mikkelsen)
sent to gauge the artist’s sanity during his time in an asylum, telling him
that “maybe God made me a painter for people who weren’t born yet.”
Dafoe’s
stellar performance is good enough to let us overlook the fact that the actor
is nearly three decades older than van Gogh was at the end of his life in 1890,
when he died of a gunshot wound at age 37. He plays the artist as a man whose
need to create is as necessary as the air he breathes. He’s also desperately
lonely, but as much as he desires to draw the world close, he can’t help
pushing it away with his sometimes volatile behavior.
Cinematographer
Benoit Delhomme’s constantly moving handheld
camerawork alternates extreme close-ups with richly textured landscapes. As the
film goes on, Schnabel and Delhomme bring in other methods to represent the
painter’s deteriorating mental state. There’s overlapping and repeated
voiceovers; sometimes the bottom half of the frame is blurred, as though we’re
watching the film through bifocals with the wrong prescription. The technique
is meant to disorient, but can sometimes feel like an emotional barrier,
keeping us at a remove. Luckily Dafoe’s performance acts as counterpoint to
those moments, always drawing us further in.
At
its best, Schnabel’s film immerses us in the artist’s occasionally scattered
perspective. It succeeds at doing what I wish more biopics were able to
accomplish, giving us a glimpse into the process of a true artist at work.
We’re given the chance to stand beside van Gogh in a golden field in the French
countryside, searching for the perfect light, and it’s thrilling to observe the
artist putting brush to canvas.
A
most unusual portrait, “At Eternity’s Gate” is an evocative look into the
troubled but brilliant mind of a man who saw the world as no one else did,
capturing the beauty and wonder in the eternal possibilities of the creative
process.
This article appears in Dec 5-11, 2018.
