A look at the life of painter Vincent van Gogh during the time he lived in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
It’s a slow love. Much like the art of Vincent van Gogh, paintings largely misunderstood and unappreciated until his death, Schnabel’s late-life portrait of Van Gogh “At Eternity’s Gate,” is disorienting and grating, with its shaky camerawork and rotating interludes of silence and bursting music. But by the end of the film, a melancholy love develops and you realize it’s a quaint masterpiece.
Schnabel presents us with an unusual biopic. It’s not your usual birth, hardship, success, and death type of story. At its worst, it’s stilted dialogue. At its best, a near religious experience full of nature, color, darkness, and Willem Dafoe’s face. Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh is painfully exquisite. His face becomes art, pure feeling. His joys become your joys and his agonies are felt in the gut.
Prior to this film, my knowledge of Van Gogh was mostly false information. Confused with other slightly mad artistic geniuses. For those who were unaware (I hope it wasn’t just me), Vincent van Gogh was indeed a tad unbalanced but did not kill himself. And while we may all know he cut off his ear, I was under the impression he cut off his ear to prove his love to a woman, which apparently was not the case. It was a far more complicated situation involving fellow artist Paul Gauguin.
Schnabel’s film touches upon the relationship between van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Oscar Issac). Issac does a fine job as Gauguin, arrogant and contentious. Sparring with van Gogh for his own delight, knowing he is basically a paid friend. It’s painful to watch the details play out on screen, and witness van Gogh’s second descent into madness.
The first descent was triggered by school children, taunting van Gogh for painting just the roots of a tree. The scene is maddening. Imagine a hoard of little jerks asking you stupid questions, crowding your space, and then try to destroy your work, and then the school teacher joins in too! It’s a serious WTF moment. And van Gogh does quite well to just shoo everyone away by frantically yelling, “Go Away!” But then again, he has a breakdown and gets put in an asylum.
The flow of the film is fragmented and intense. It’s as if raw memories were plucked from time and pieced together unedited. You become van Gogh. See with his eyes, hear with his ear/s, and allow yourself to be overcome by the beauty of nature and destroyed by the spiteful vacuity of humankind.
Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate” is a poetic portrayal of a man’s soul. It’s by no means an easy watch, as the construction of the film will turn many off but it’s one of Willem Dafoe’s best performances. And for that reason alone, it should be watched multiple times, until every twitch of Dafoe’s face is burned into your mind forever.
Available on Blu-ray™ (plus Digital), DVD, and On Demand February 12th
