Both dead and alive
Vincent van Gogh’s resurrection subject of film’s painted portrait
“Jesus wasn’t discovered until 30 or 40 years after he died.” So says Vincent van Gogh in writer-director (and painter!) Julian Schnabel’s new film about the last days of the Dutch artist, who died of a gunshot wound in the south of France in 1890. It’s a clever reference, and not just because the guy delivering the line is Willem Dafoe, who 30 years ago played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s also a nod to the fact that van Gogh’s reputation (and commercial success) only fully flowered in the decades after his demise. At 63, Dafoe doesn’t seem a natural choice to play van Gogh, who was just 37 when he died. But the actor embodies something of the artist’s mercurial temperament — he screams at a group of schoolchildren who interrupt his work in the countryside, and accosts a woman on the road, demanding she lie down so he can sketch her. He finds rapture in the nature around him, but has difficulty communicating it in words. “I am my paintings,” he says at one point, simply and succinctly. Schnabel directs infrequently — his last film was 2010’s Miral — but he’s found a worthy subject in At Eternity’s Gate. And while his handheld camerawork can sometimes be shaky enough to induce nausea, it’s interspersed with long, still scenes in which Vincent discusses his craft or his life (or both) with various interlocutors who stare directly into the camera. The film moves us most when it doesn’t move at all. These foils include Rupert Friend as the painter’s brother, Theo; Oscar Isaac as fellow artist Paul Gauguin; and Mads Mikkelsen as a priest who suggests that what Vincent does isn’t even art. Unperturbed, van Gogh responds: “Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet.” Touché! At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t aim to be a cradle-to-grave biopic, and it will appeal most to those with a previous interest in the artist; if you insist on saying his last name with the guttural “van-hockh” instead of “van-go,” get your tickets now. (Although interestingly, no one in the movie says it that way.) But Dafoe’s immersive performance captures an emotional state, as when van Gogh, after cutting off his own ear, tells a doctor: “I believe I have a menacing spirit around me. I saw him and I tried to cut him out of myself.” But in the same conversation he notes of his art: “I can make people feel what it’s like to be alive.” That he did.