Portrait of the artist as an old curmudgeon
Final Portrait
15 cert, 90 min Dir Stanley Tucci Starring Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Sylvie Testud, Clémence Poésy, Tony Shalhoub
Geoffrey Rush makes such a persuasively grotty Alberto Giacometti, it’s hard to tell where the man ends and the stump of his cigarette begins. Trudging around his Paris studio, clay clinging to his clothes and skin, Rush’s rendering of the Swiss painter and sculptor looks a lot like one of his creations – knobbly, stark and narrow-framed, rooted to his unprepossessing lot.
Stanley Tucci’s new film – his fifth as director, and first in which he remains behind the camera – is a snapshot of three weeks in 1946, during which Giacometti worked on a portrait of the American art critic James Lord, played here by Armie Hammer with waspish finesse. The process was outlined by Lord with a mixture of fondness and frustration in his book, A Giacometti Portrait, which Tucci has spun out into this witty chamber piece.
Giacometti’s plan was for a “quick sketch” that would take “an afternoon at most”. But the project wore on for a month as he endlessly reworked the canvas. In the film, it’s as if both men become locked together in a bleak, existential farce: a dilapidated Didi and a debonair Gogo, waiting endlessly for Godot in the form of a finishing brushstroke. Giacometti and Samuel Beckett were friends in real life – and though the Irish playwright doesn’t appear in Tucci’s film, you can sense his spirit lingering just out of shot, as absurdity sets in like rising damp.
Tucci introduces Giacometti with a drily amusing anticlimax: Lord strolls through the vibrant streets of Paris to picturesque accordion music, only for the melody and vitality to snap off the moment he enters the artist’s abode, where Giacometti is gloomily fussing with various unfinished pieces. The cinematographer is Danny Cohen, who with this, The King’s Speech (2010) and Room (2015) is evidently the go-to guy when you need to shoot the same two faces and four walls a hundred ways and make it beautiful each time.
Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his unsteady accent. It’s an entertaining performance – his glances and gestures are all keenly observed, and he doesn’t resort to bad language so much as rev it, like the engine of a vintage car he’s been tinkering with.
As the painting progresses – or doesn’t – various Giacometti associates blow in and out. Tony Shalhoub plays the artist’s brother, Diego, with a lightness of spirit that cuts elegantly through the curmudgeonly pall, while Clémence Poésy is his muse, a high-spirited prostitute called Caroline. The storyline barely spans 18 days, but a sparkling appreciation of Giacometti’s life, philosophy and process coheres from its deft lines. Tucci’s film doesn’t concern itself with broad strokes or bigger pictures. It’s a delightful, nimble miniature, as thought-provoking in the long term as it is wryly entertaining in the moment.