Just paint the man’s picture already
If you get a kick out of watching paint dry — or more precisely watching it painted over before it has a chance to — this biopic about 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 he’ll be done in a day or two. But on Day 4 he reveals 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. 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.
But by focusing on this singular act of creation, Tucci reduces his subject to little more than a caricature of the tortured artist. Was he driven by thwarted love? A quest for perfection? The closest we get is when Diego, Alberto’s younger brother played by Tony Shalhoub, 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.