Julian Schnabel (2018)
The screening we went to at Curzon Richmond was prefaced by a caption announcing a livestream Q&A with the writer-director Julian Schnabel straight after the film. I was sorry to have to dash off immediately (to BFI) – Schnabel had plenty of explaining to do. In the event, I didn’t miss anything: Sally stayed but no Q&A materialised. When she queried this with the box office, they had no idea what she was talking about.
Vincent van Gogh’s restless soul and imagination can’t compete with the handheld camerawork used by Schnabel to express them in At Eternity’s Gate. (The certificate should carry a may-induce-motion-sickness warning.) The cinematographer Benoît Delhomme does remarkable things with light but following Vincent (Willem Dafoe) through the countryside around Arles is a bit bewildering. Sometimes, we get his point of view, sometimes he appears in the frame. The now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t approach seems to make no difference to the camera’s frenetic movement.
This is Julian Schnabel’s first work for cinema in eight years and only his sixth in more than twenty. It’s also the first time since his debut feature Basquiat (1996) that he’s taken a fellow artist as his subject. Meanwhile, he has made a decent film in Before Night Falls (2000) and an excellent one in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), which benefited from Ronald Harwood’s ingeniously constructed screenplay. This time, and although Schnabel has the help of Jean-Claude Carrière (they and Louise Kugelberg share the writing credit), the script is weak. Illustrations of the genesis of famous paintings are banal or, in the case of ‘A Pair of Shoes’, risible. Freezing cold, Vincent enters his room in the yellow house at Arles. After eventually getting round to closing the window to shut out a howling wind, he takes off his boots and puts them in position; he’s ready to start work on the masterpiece. I’d like to think but don’t believe that Schnabel means this curious behaviour to reflect van Gogh’s disturbed state of mind. As for the dialogue … Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) tells Vincent things like ‘I have an established reputation to protect’ and ‘our temperaments are incompatible’. When Vincent asks his brother Theo (Rupert Friend) ‘tell me … am I a good painter?’ the answer suggests that Theo has been watching too many Britain’s Got Talent auditions: ‘You’re not a good painter, Vincent,’ he replies, ‘you’re a great painter!’
Willem Dafoe’s radiant, tormented face and congested, impassioned voice are enough to convince you he could have been not a good van Gogh but a great one – if circumstances hadn’t conspired against him. The problem isn’t just that Schnabel’s direction makes Dafoe’s work incoherent. Even in an account of the artist’s final years and allowing that Vincent is meant to be an old soul, having a sixty-three-year-old in the role doesn’t make sense. (Van Gogh died at the age of thirty-seven.) Still, it’s no small achievement that Dafoe is able to suggest, with admirable naturalness, not only a nobility of spirit but that Vincent really is experiencing the world on a different plane of existence. The look in Rupert Friend’s eyes makes Theo’s brotherly love feel genuine too. It doesn’t help that Gauguin, not for the first time on screen, is a self-seeking bastard and has more than his fair share of the clunkiest lines but Oscar Isaac is still a disappointment. The two best scenes come late in the film: when a priest (Mads Mikkelsen) interviews Vincent shortly before his release fom the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence; and when Dr Gachet (Mathieu Amalric) sits for his portrait. Mads Mikkelsen plays the priest, who is sympathetic though aesthetically uncomprehending, with formidable concentration. Mathieu Amalric brings subtle, greatly refreshing humour to proceedings and gives Willem Dafoe a brief chance to follow suit. It may be no coincidence that the camera is relatively at rest during both these sequences.
Tatiana Lisovskaya’s severely important music serves the film’s portentousness well. Taken from that of a van Gogh painting (‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’) produced in the last months of his life, the title is awful in more ways than one – as well as rather misleading. In conversation with the priest, Vincent talks about his ‘relationship to eternity’; when the priest asks what he means by this, the answer is ‘the time to come’. Since Vincent has already speculated that ‘maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet’, eternity gets to sound increasingly like posterity. ‘At Posterity’s Gate’ – that title would have been less awful in one sense, more awful in the other.
2 April 2019
