At Eternity’s Gate
(USA/France/Switzerland, 110 min.)
Dir. Julian Schnabel, Writ. Jean-Claude Carrière, Louise Kugelberg, Julian
Schnabel
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac,
Emmanuelle Seigner, Mads Mikkelsen
Julian Schnabel is a master of visual poetry. The
Oscar-nominated director of The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly returns with another original and impeccably
realized dive into the artistic process. Schnabel, a painter as well as a
filmmaker, daubs a canvas of dreams and madness while bringing to the screen
the brilliant yet troubled mind of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, played
masterfully by Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project). The film is not a cradle to grave biography of the artist who is
as famous for his Starry Night
painting as he is for cutting off his ear. Instead, it’s an impressionistic interpretation
of a genius both fuelled and plagued by demons. At Eternity’s Gate feels the evocative portrait Van Gogh would have
wanted.
Schnabel, working from a screenplay written with his partner
Louise Kugelberg (who also edited the film with him) and master filmmaker
Jean-Claude Carrière, presents audiences with Van Gogh as a blank canvas. This
Van Gogh is the epitome of a starving artist when we meet him, destitute and
penniless, surviving only on the charity of his brother Theo (Rupert Friend)
and the patience of the local hotelier, Madame Ginoux (Emmanuelle Seigner).
Vincent is in a bit of a rut as depression plagues him in the small town
despite the warmth and sunshine. He paints daily, but mostly eye-catching, if
derivative landscapes. One scene sees a spark of genius as he plunks his boots
down onto the stone floor and captures their likeness in elegant strokes.
Looking beyond the portraits of divinity held in high esteem by the classists,
Van Gogh seeks a way to elevate the mundane using swathes of shadow and light.
The film follows Van Gogh around the countryside as he searches
for, and occasionally finds, beauty in fits and starts of artistic madness. A
sketch here and a watercolour there, and At
Eternity’s Gate conveys the tedious and sometimes debilitating struggle of
the creative process. Van Gogh is often at the cusp of creating something
great, but he needs the right mood or spark to achieve it.
Take, for example, the beauty of his host Madame Ginoux. The
working class hotel matron obviously has an interest in Van Gogh’s art,
curiously asking questions of the artist when virtually everyone else in the
village avoids Vincent like the plague. She even casts some baiting questions
with hopes to become his next subject. Schnabel and cinematographer Benoît
Delhomme (The Theory of Everything)
offer a curious point of view shot from Van Gogh’s perspective that takes in
Madame Ginoux’s smiling face. Whatever beauty she has, he doesn’t see it. The
drab shadows of her dining room emphasize the weathers of age and labour.
Instead, he asks the mailman to sit for him and model a face better
characterized by awful lighting, much to Madame Ginoux’s obvious
disappointment.
Cut to a later scene and Madame Ginoux, decked out in her
Sunday best, sits for Van Gogh’s friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin (Oscar
Isaac). The light hits Madame Ginoux just right as she avoids Vincent’s gaze
and shields herself from his view. With a spark, he sets paintbrush to canvas.
The rest is history as the beautiful woman, who seemed drab and homely from one
perspective, inspires one of the 19th century’s most iconic series
of portraits.
At Eternity’s Gate consists
of these revelatory moments in which Van Gogh finds his voice as an artist. The
film evokes the maddening joy of the creative process as Schnabel and Kugelberg
convey Vincent’s energy through shot duration and tempo as some scenes spark
with the same short and furious strokes with which Van Gogh dabbles paint into his
gorgeous landscape impressions. Art lovers will especially relish how At Eternity’s Gate captures the textural
qualities of Van Gogh’s art by bringing the camera up close and intimate to the
canvas as the lens all but caresses the swathes of paint in Vincent’s work that
Gauguin likens to clay mouldings. Similarly, Delhomme’s camera finds a grand
canvas on Dafoe’s face and enjoys in Van Gogh’s weathered and frazzled visage
the same textural qualities that bring the artist’s landscapes to life.
Wrinkles have never been as evocative as the sun hits them just right, and At Eternity’s Gate finds in its
compositions the same attention to light and shadow that makes Van Gogh’s work
so strong.
This portrait of an artist as a tortured soul finds an
equally fine painter in Dafoe, who gives an immersive performance as Van Gogh. At Eternity’s Gate is a great example of
taking a character actor and making him a leading man as the uncanny
characteristics of Dafoe’s face—his sharp noise and wild eyes—offer both a fair
likeness for Vincent van Gogh and a perfect vessel for the artist’s inner
turmoil. If there is one look that Dafoe masters well, it’s that of a madman,
but he also brings the same warmth and humanity that drew such acclaim to his
work in last year’s The Florida Project.
His Vincent Van Gogh is a man of light and darkness, brought to life with the
same vivid details of the artist’s best self-portraits.
At Eternity’s Gate opens
in Toronto at the Varsity on Nov. 23.