That dude could paint! There are biopics of artists that dont ask more of an audience than that simple reaction. Not so with Julian Schnabels extraordinary At Eternitys Gate, which features a monumental, career-best performance from Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh. Its not that Schnabel doesnt glory in the visions the Dutch painter put on canvas. But Schnabel, renowned as a painter in the way Van Gogh never was in life, wants to get inside the head of this tormented artist and make us see what he sees, as though were living his life and not just watching it.As the director puts it: This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Goghs letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist. This unorthodox approach can be off-putting at times, but mostly it blows the dust off standard biopic-making and gives the film a propulsive, this-just-in immediacy.
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At Eternitys Gate is a ravishment of the senses, with cinematographer Benot Delhomme a master of the handheld camera capturing the gorgeous play of sunlight on flowers, wheat fields and anything that else that seized Van Goghs attention. Its also a study of the agony Van Gogh endured in his final years (he committed suicide in 1890 at 37), mad with talent and his own violent delirium to the point of cutting off his left ear (a moment unseen here).
Though the film begins in Paris, where critics ignore his work and even his supportive brother Theo (Rupert Friend) cant alleviate his despair, Van Gogh soon heads south to Provence, encouraged by fellow artist Paul Gauguin (a stellar Oscar Isaac), who tells him thats where the light is at its most glorious. Its in the small town of Arles where Van Gogh in a burst of creative energy completed 75 paintings in 80 days. His impoverished circumstances in a one-room hovel dont bother him. In nature, hes ecstatic. Every time I look, I see something Ive never seen before, he says. And Schnabel makes sure that we feel that ecstasy as well. Its Van Goghs antisocial behavior that lands him in a nearby asylum, where crushing loneliness takes its toll. He bristles at criticism of his work, especially when Gauguin accuses him of overpainting, making the globs of oil on his canvas look like sculpture. Maybe God made me a painter for people who arent here yet, Van Gogh notes prophetically. Its perhaps too much of an on-point line in an otherwise subtly idiosyncratic screenplay that Schnabel wrote with Jean-Claude Carrire and Louise Kugelberg. In a touching reversal on the Van Gogh mythos, Schnabel shows an artist who seems more rational as the world dismisses him as crazy.
There have been dozens of other films about Van Gogh, most notably Vincente Minnellis Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas, Robert Altmans Vincent & Theo with Tim Roth and Dorota Kobielas animated Loving Vincent with Robert Gulaczyk voicing the artist. But its Schnabel who gets closest to his subject, which should be no surprise given his cinematic interest in artists and their process, from the Haitian neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat inBasquiatto the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas inBefore Night Falls and the French editor and writer Jean-Dominique Bauby inThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Marvelous films all. But in At Eternitys Gate, Schnabel goes deeper than ever before into the art of making art and the human toll it exacts. Dafoe, looking like a Van Gogh self-portrait come to life, becomes the ideal canvas for Schnabel to paint his feelings on film. You can argue about At Eternitys Gate, debate its merits as drama and its fullness as biography, but Schnabel and Dafoe make you feel it in your bones. And that, no question, is an artistic triumph.