Butler's Cinema Scene

James Booth as Armand Roulin

“LOVING VINCENT” My rating: B

93 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Loving Vincent” is work of adoring fanaticism, an investigation into Vincent Van Gogh’s death through animation that mimics his dynamic and instantly recognizable style of painting.

Van Gogh’s portrait of the real Armand Roulin

It is, we’re told, “the world’s first fully painted feature film” in which each  of the movie’s 60,000-plus frames have been rendered in oil by a crew of more than 100 artists.

What directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welshman have accomplished here is, from a visual point of view, spectacularly mesmerizing.

As a narrative their film (co-scripted with Jack Dehnel) has some issues, but ultimately it works its way under the viewer’s skin.

Unfolding a year after Vincent’s death in the small French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, the story centers on Armand Roulin (James Booth).  Armand is a dedicated drinker and brawler living in Arles, where the artist often lived and painted during his last years. (Vincent actually did a portrait of Armand, and  throughout the movie the young man wears then bright yellow jacket in which he posed.)

This handsome ne’er-do-well is sent on a mission by his father, the local postmaster (Chris O’Dowd).  The elder Roulin has in his possession a letter written by Vincent to his brother Theo but never sent.  Now the old man dispatches Armand off to Paris to deliver the letter to its intended recipient.

Alas, he discovers that Theo died not long after his brother.  Hoping to locate Theo’s widow, Armand travels to Auvers, along the way collecting information about Vincent from those who crossed his path.  (Vincent, played by Robert Gulaczyk, is seen only in black-and-white flashbacks painted to resemble charcoal drawings.)

Though he never asked for this fool’s quest, the selfish Armand is slowly energized and inflamed by his amateur detective work. He begins to suspect that Vincent’s death was not a suicide at all, but either a deliberate murder or an accidental shooting that the dying painter covered up by claiming to have shot himself.

Robert Gulaczyk as Vincent Van Gogh

The film appears to have been shot more or less conventionally with actors (among them familiar faces like
Helen McCrory, John Sessions, Saoirse Ronan and Jerome  Flynn). That footage was then converted to paintings…the effect is not unlike the rotoscoping employed by Disney for the characters of Snow White and Prince Charming.

This makes for some pretty awesome visuals, but at a certain dramatic cost.  There’s no conveyor of emotions as effective as the human face, but here the faces have been digitally painted over  (sort of like they’d been run through a gigantic photoshop filter). This slight abstraction of the actor’s features, gestures and expressions serves as a sort of emotional barrier.  It’s hard to break through.

For fans of Van Gogh’s life and work, “Loving Vincent” is a fantastic wallow.  It dabbles in recent alternate theories about how the artist died (without actually endorsing one). It introduces as characters real individuals who befriended Vincent and were painted by him…invariably they wear the same clothing seen in their now-famous portraits.

It offers a slightly different Vincent than the ones we’ve seen on screen previously.  This time around he’s not a lunatic or a depressive, but rather a quiet, soft-spoken sort who always vaguely out of sync with the individuals around  him.

And most of all it brings his paintings to new life in a  weirdly seductive way.

| Robert W. Butler