Stanley Tucci (2017)
While James Lord was visiting Paris in 1964, his friend Alberto Giacometti asked him to sit for a portrait. Flattered and intrigued, Lord agreed. He was shortly to return to the United States but Giacometti assured him the sitting shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. In the event, the portrait took rather longer: dissatisfied with his work, Giacometti kept erasing what he’d drawn – or most of what he’d drawn – and starting again; Lord kept re-booking his flight home. According to Stanley Tucci’s film about this episode, the sitting ended only when Lord, realising it could go on indefinitely, decided to stand up for himself. Tucci, who wrote as well as directed Final Portrait, reproduces the feelings of exasperation and claustrophobia that James Lord experiences. I stayed in my seat but might have walked if the movie had been much longer than its ninety minutes. In retrospect, I’m relieved I already was a Giacometti fan and had read and liked Lord’s 2004 book Mythic Giacometti: if my introduction to them had been through Final Portrait, it would have acted as a deterrent.
The secondary meaning of Tucci’s title may be close to a literal description of the drawing of Lord, who explains in his closing voiceover that Giacometti died ‘soon afterwards’ (actually in January 1966). But the title primarily refers to a contradiction in terms: the film seems to share Giacometti’s view that a work of art is inherently and inevitably a work in progress. He makes this explicit when he tells Lord that photography has rendered portraiture in art to some extent obsolete – that this makes it essential for the latter to be incomplete. In spite of berating himself for failing to realise what he wants to achieve from drawing Lord, Giacometti also accepts this endless striving as fundamental to the artist’s job (‘All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay’). Tucci succeeds in dramatising this idea but at only a basic level: he hardly develops it.
We assume that Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) is relatively satisfied with his rendering of Lord’s eyes, which always remain after the rest of the portrait is rubbed out. The contrast between their haunted expression and the blandly handsome features of the sitter (Armie Hammer) provides one of the film’s strongest images – along with a shot of Giacometti walking in the rain with his coat pulled nearly over his head. (I was predisposed to notice the latter. It’s presumably inspired by a photograph of Giacometti ‘on Rue d’Alésia, Paris, 1961’: I cut this out of the TLS years ago and still have it pinned up in the study.) Although Danny Cohen’s muted, verging-on-monochrome palette gives it a distinctive look, Final Portrait isn’t that visually interesting: the artist’s studio contains plenty of his emaciated little men sculptures but they’re background figures, part of the set dressing. Giacometti’s remark about photography as a usurper stands out in the two principals’ conversations about art. Since James Lord went on to write acclaimed biographies of both Giacometti and Picasso, what Tucci gives him to say about their work is surprisingly tame. When Giacometti bitches about Picasso and Braque, Lord replies that the Cubists ‘made pretty things’ and that he thinks Alberto is ‘being a bit hard’. Giacometti’s portrait of Lord is, according to the latter, ‘good’.
I got the impression that Stanley Tucci felt that Giacometti’s extraordinary ménage – the man himself, his ill-used wife Annette (Sylvie Testud), his favourite prostitute Caroline (Clémence Poésy), his brother Diego (Tony Shalhoub) – would be irresistibly entertaining. Whether they are is a matter of personal taste, of course, and the people on the screen mostly got on my nerves. The Hot Club de France-type jazz violin music that accompanies the narrative made matters worse. (I assume this was pastiche rather than a Stéphane Grappelli track. If so, Evan Lurie, who scored the film, emulates the torturous effect of listening to Grappelli.) Giacometti’s relationships with Annette, Caroline and Diego – and James Lord – yield insights into his personality and working methods that are clear but not rich.
Geoffrey Rush, with his craggy features, is something of an artwork himself. His head is almost a sculpture. In profile at least, he resembles Giacometti. But the part is so thinly written that Rush always seems what he is here: a major actor doing a standard-issue genius turn. Stanley Tucci’s Giacometti is unreasonably demanding of other people and of himself – you know, the way artists are. (He even has madly untidy hair.) Armie Hammer’s role is unrewarding – he’s Tucci’s stooge, as much as Lord is Giacometti’s. The artist tells the sitter he has the look of a brute, the look of a man who could kill another man. Hammer’s flawless, innocuous face is enough to convince you that Alberto Giacometti’s gifts include an unusual depth of perception.
22 August 2017
