BROAD STROKES
Biopic of Swiss artist is beautiful, yet doesn’t go beyond caricature of Giacometti
FINAL PORTRAIT
★★ 1/2 out of five Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer Director: Stanley Tucci Duration: 1h 30m
If you get a kick out of watching paint dry — or more precisely watching it painted over before it has a chance to — then this biopic about the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti is for you. That also holds true if you like the idea of closely observing Armie Hammer. Honestly, the guy is off-the-hook handsome.
Hammer plays James Lord, an American writer who became friends with Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) in Paris a few years before the artist’s death in 1966. Giacometti suggests Lord sit for a painting, and the young man gamely agrees. He has no idea what’s coming. Turns out Sartre only had it half right. Hell isn’t other people; hell is other people painting. The artist assures his subject that he’ll be done in a day or two. But on Day 4 he reveals that he’s finally ready to begin. Lord delays his flight home, then pushes it again. But as days become weeks, Giacometti is never happy; every time the portrait seems close to completion, he paints out everything except the eyes and begins again.
Final Portrait is the latest from Stanley Tucci, who mostly works as an actor but every five or 10 years sits down to write and direct. His last was Blind Date with Patricia Clarkson in 2007. He also made the wonderful 1996 film Big Night.
Rush does a great job of portraying the artist as a bundle of neuroses. Lord shows surprise that Giacometti has become more uncertain of his talent as his fame has grown, but the artist doesn’t find that odd at all: “What better breeding ground for doubt than success?”
And yet the film never quite manages to scrape away enough of Giacometti’s affectations to give us a solid sense of the man beneath the smock. We meet his long-suffering wife (Sylvie Testud) and his prostitute-girlfriend (Clémence Poésy), their interactions showing how unaware he is of the value of money. (What better breeding ground for profligacy than wealth?) Tony Shalhoub shows up as Diego, Alberto’s younger brother, given to shaking his head and clucking at his sibling ’s behaviour.
But by focusing on this singular act of creation, Tucci reduces his subject to little more than a caricature of the tortured artist. (One bizarre scene, never alluded to again, has Alberto imbibing numerous glasses of wine, cups of coffee and plates of food while the bemused Lord sips a bottle of Coca-Cola.) Was he driven by thwarted love? A quest for perfection? The closest we get is when Diego remarks mildly: “My brother can only be happy when he is desperate and uncomfortable.”
Final Portrait is a beautifully designed film. You could get lost in the details of the disarranged studio where the master works — or in the strangely poreless sheen of Hammer’s face. But unless you enter a Giacometti fan, you’re doubtful to emerge as one, or to feel any closer to the artist’s life.