‘At Eternity’s Gate’ a portrait of van Gogh
“I just want to be one of them.” Spoken over a black screen, that line is the artist’s first salvo in the dark. Vincent van Gogh, of course, would never be one of them. His aching apartness was fundamental to his singular artistic expression, and “At Eternity’s Gate” captures that ravaged state of mind, one that destroyed the self even as it created artistic masterworks that would command reverence for generations.
There’s something bracingly lunatic about casting Willem Dafoe, who was 62 at the time of filming, to play a man who died at 37. Whether or not it works rationally is immaterial; there’s much about the film that doesn’t. That’s because “At Eternity’s Gate” is less biography than feeling. Dafoe might not make logical sense in the role, but he commands it, his demon-haunted eyes communicating the artist’s inner turmoil during the fertile creative period in the south of France that presaged his final unraveling.
Dafoe’s van Gogh is an exile on earth, a pilgrim sent to document what he sees for those to come. He’s enviably close to his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), the one true champion of his life and a stalwart advocate. But Theo has a young family of his own to tend to, and can’t be with him while he traipses the French countryside in a straw hat, painting the world in vivid blues and yellows. He has an occasional friend in painter Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), who’s equal parts intrigued and repulsed by his contemporary, but who pulls away when a desperate van Gogh cleaves closer. His is a loneliness that overwhelms.
The film, when it works, is extraordinary. The camera is wild, vibrating on van Gogh’s wavelength, its movements erratic and focus bleary, as if it too is suffering a depressive episode. It doesn’t record Dafoe’s performance but rather acts in concert with it, trying to do what van Gogh’s paintings do: Show us the world as he sees it. But in trying to keep pace with Dafoe’s performance, the film sometimes slips into pretension, piling on cinematic affectations in thick brushstrokes.
The writing is another of the film’s sour notes. The characters sometimes speak in a circular bore, engaged in ponderous conversations about the nature of art and the artist’s purpose. When van Gogh suffers a crisis, the middling dialogue repeats on a loop, mimicking the echo chamber in his brain. Sometimes less is more; the film would have benefited from getting out of its own way and letting Dafoe take the lead.
Dafoe’s performance is so captivatingly other, it’s clear why others don’t understand him, why women recoil from and schoolchildren lob rocks at the muttering depressive who paints the world strange. The film needn’t exhaustively interrogate him – by doctors, priests, other artists – to communicate the schism in his soul. Dafoe’s rictus of pain says it all.
‘At Eternity’s Gate’
Great Fair Julian Schnabel. Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac.
PG-13 for some thematic content.
At Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square.
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