A portrait that’s worth looking at
At Eternity’s Gate (12A) Verdict: Classy biopic The Highwaymen (15) Verdict: Bonnie and Clyde, retold
HERE are a pair of films you can see this weekend without leaving your armchair.
At Eternity’s Gate, available on Curzon Home Cinema and in what they call ‘select cinemas’, which is marketing speak for not very many, is the story of Vincent Van Gogh in his final years.
Willem Dafoe received a richly deserved Academy Award nomination for his compelling performance as Vincent (I still can’t believe he and Christian Bale, as Dick Cheney in Vice, were beaten by Rami Malek’s dentures, by the way, but that’s another matter). He gets sterling support from Rupert Friend as his concerned brother Theo, who buys one canvas a month from the impoverished Vincent to keep him on his feet, and from Oscar Isaac as his friend Paul Gauguin.
Thanks largely to the remarkable Dafoe, Julian Schnabel’s film does a fine job of putting us in the mind of the great 19th-century artist. But it’s a weird place to be.
THE Highwaymen, a Netflix release, tells the tale of Bonnie and Clyde from the perspective of former Texas Rangers Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), who were tasked with tracking down the murderous bank robbers.
It was Hamer, after a long, singleminded pursuit, who orchestrated the famous deadly ambush on a country road in Louisiana in 1934.
John Lee Hancock’s film certainly finds a more morally upright way of telling the story than Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 picture Bonnie And Clyde.
Hamer, in particular, is disgusted by the folk-hero status of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow — which, of course, was compounded by Penn’s film, thanks not least to the casting of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty.
Here, deliberately, we see very little of the outlaws, instead following Hamer and Gault in what is essentially a cussed-old-codger road-trip movie.
Screenwriter John Fusco rather indulges himself with too much long-winded speechifying along the way, but Costner and Harrelson are such class acts that it’s mostly a pleasure to go along for the ride.