At Eternity's Gate
starring Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner and Oscar Isaac
written by Jean-Claude Carrière, Louise Kugelberg and Julian Schnabel
directed by Julian Schnabel
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
This is another biopic of the life of Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) in the southern French city of Arles. When the film started, I quickly thought it was going to be a re-make of the classic Kirk Douglas film Lust for Life (1956, directed by Vincente Minnelli). But it wasn’t. It’s certainly comparable, but it’s not a re-make.
I’d always been taught that the artist killed himself after a long battle with various mental demons. He was certainly a guy who didn’t have all his nuts and bolts tight. Dafoe did an excellent job portraying the artist, his personality quirks, his health and money problems, his relationships with the people of Arles. But it got a little tiring after a while. In life, one of Van Gogh’s problems was that he alienated people. He wasn’t well liked. He was dirty, smelly, and a malnourished alcoholic. In modern parlance we might label that discrimination against the disabled and treat him with over-indulgence rather than as a social pariah.
Van Gogh is trying to understand himself, and he’s trying to forge a philosophy of art. But he has little luck in that because, first, he has few artist friends with whom to discuss his work, except for Paul Gaugin (Oscar Isaac) and, second, his ideas were so unconventional. The Gaugin friendship was turbulent. In the 1956 film Lust for Life, Gaugin was played by Anthony Quinn, and their relationship was played as borderline belligerent, short-tempered and argumentative. But in At Eternity’s Gate their relationship is almost homosexual. Vincent dotes on Paul and pines like a madman, or like a heartbroken lover by Gaugin’s decision to leave Arles and travel.
I was impressed by Dafoe’s athleticism. He played Van Gogh trekking relentlessly - almost driven - around the countryside, mesmerized by the sunlight and the colors, looking for inspiration. Although he did portraits, Van Gogh is best known for his landscapes. He famously painted quickly, trying to finish paintings at once, in a single sitting. Finally, he famously lathered on his oil paints so thickly that - as Gaugin commented - his paintings were almost like sculpture, as if Van Gogh not only wanted to see his colors, but to feel them as well. Maybe he even ingested his paint.
Interestingly, in the end, the film suggested that Van Gogh’s death was the result of an attack (by gunshot) during a robbery of the artist, rather than suicide (by self-inflicted gunshot to the chest). I’d never heard that idea before. I don’t favor explanations that explore an artist’s mental pathology contributing to his art - Van Gogh and schizophrenia, or Glenn Gould and bipolar disorder, Mozart and Asperger’s syndrome, etc. I prefer to think that artists in their right minds are responsible for their work, and their work was simply the inexplicable product of their uncanny genius. Appealing to mental illness seems to diminish their accomplishments somehow, and it robs me of the fantasy of ‘normal’ people achieving creative greatness.