The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Geoffrey Rush delivers winning performance in ‘Final Portrait’
One of the finest bits of filmmaking in the 20th century came late in Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night,” a raucous comedy that ended with a quiet masterpie ce of staging and acting, as two brothers — played by Tucci and Tony Shalhoub — made eggs together in ritualistic morning silence. Photographed so that their dancelike move- ments were on full display, they communicated in body language and facial expression what conventional film- makers would have spelled outw ith reams of bulky and redundant dialogue.
Tucci brings simil ar restraint and taste for subtlety to his latest directo- rial effort, “Final Portrait,” which even incl udesasimilarly wordless sequence. This time, the setting is the Paris studio of the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti as he and his brother Diego (Shalhoub, again) move amid the easels, rags and creative detritus with the reflexive, instinctive ease of ballet dancers embarking on a familiar pas de deux.
Such momen tsareamong the most pleasing in “Final Portrait,” which focuses on the end of Giacomet-
ti’s career, when in 1964 he invited author and arts-scene gadflyJ a mesLordtositfora painting. Considered by many critics to be Giacometti’s last great pic ture, the artwork emerges slowly through the course of a film that depicts the creative process, not as the fully formed expression of genius, but as a slow-going daily grind of false starts and bouts of self-doubt.
Films about painters are notoriously difficult to get right. There’s often too much theatrical brush-jabbing and pretend-thoughtful scowling. But Tucci successfully banishes those cliches in a finely observed character study that possesses the ring of careworn, unprettified truth.
Most of the credit for that sense of authenticity go esto Geoffrey Rush, who portrays Giacometti in a performance that is b oth ferocious and abashed, capturing the leo- nine Great Man as he enters the winter of old age, declin- ing virility and impending death. But “Final Portrait” suggests that his inability to let go might have less to do with perfectionism and the tyranny of one’s own aspi- rational ideals than primal anxieties having to do with endings in all their forms.
Compared with Rush’s funny, touching, some- times confounding perfor- mance, Armie Hammer isn’t nearly as natural as the proper, stiffly deferen- tial Lord. Tucci stages much of “Final Portrait” in the artist’s studio, here designed as a chiaroscuro collection of layered grays and chalk-whites against which Lord’s spotless navy jacket stands out like a primly strait-laced rebuke. Rather than probe Giacometti and Lord’s curiously arms-length relationship, “Final Portrait” is at its bests imply watching the artist work — the “artist,” in this case, meaning both Giacometti and Rush. It’s been a long time since audiences have seen him tuck into and dominate a role with such thoroughgoing forcefulness and charisma. It’s nice to see him finally get the palette and canvas he deserves.