Butler's Cinema Scene

Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer

“FINAL PORTRAIT” My rating: B 

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Genius marches to its own drummer, expecting mere mortals to keep time. And if we can’t maintain the pace, genius will  blithely leave us behind.

Stanley Tucci’s droll “Final Portrait” depicts a real-life encounter between genius in the form of artist Alberto Giacometti and a young man whose idol worship will come back to bite him in the posterior.

Based on James Lord’s 1965 memoir A Giacometti Portrait, the terse film, punctuated by deadpan comedic moments, depicts a 1964  incident in which Lord, an American journalist who often wrote about the art scene, agreed to pose for Giacometti in his Paris studio.  At the time the artist — known worldwide for his elongated sculptures — was concentrating on painting.

Lord is played by Armie Hammer as a handsome but bland young man, probably gay, who jumps at the chance to spent time in the presence of greatness. Giacometti, portrayed with rumpled self-absorption by Geoffrey Rush, says the sittings will take only a couple of days.

Maybe he honestly believes that. In any case, the three-day sitting turns into a three-week slog, with Lord dutifully showing up every day to sit while Giacometti paints, chain smokes, curses, repeatedly starts over and finds numerous opportunities to lay down his brush for alcoholic and sexual diversions. What started out as an art fan’s thrill turns into an existential dilemma.

Time after time Lord must cancel the plane tickets for his return to New York. He detects a recurring pattern in the artist’s  reluctance — refusal even — to finish a work, and begins playing mind games to nudge Giacometti toward completing the portrait.

All this unfolds in the artist’s studio, a cellar-like dustbin right out of “La Boheme” filmed in desaturated hues that cloak everything save human flesh in a gray pall.

And there are other players here. Like Giacometti’s brother Diego (Tony Shalhoub, almost unrecognizable), an artist in his own right who spends most of his time puttering around the edges of his older sibling’s environment and vaguely commiserating with Lord.

There’s Mrs. Giocametti (Sylvie Testud), who is not thrilled that her husband has become so obsessed with a local prostitute (Clemence Poesy) that he buys her a spiffy sports car.

In a sense all this peripheral activity is but a distraction from the main event, the painting of “Portrait of James Lord,” which in 2015 was sold at auction for $21 million.

The real James Lord daily took photos of the work in the progress (we see the filmic version of him doing the same) and those photos were employed by Tucci and company to show the brushstroke-by-brushstroke creation — and periodic destruction — of the painting.

At one point the frustrated Giacometti observes that paintings seem to have minds of their own, that the artist has almost no control over what is assembling itself on canvas.

Giacometti is one of Rush’s finest performances, a slow-bubbling cauldron of depression, creativity, frustration and contempt. He dismisses his wife as “a bourgeoise little girl” (merely because she wants to use some of the millions of francs hidden in the studio for a new coat) and considers Picasso a “phony.”

He erupts in explosive expletives and treats his volunteer subject like hired help.

“Don’t scratch.”

“I have an itch.”

“Don’t itch.”

Like Lord, Stanley Tucci — an actor whose directing efforts include “Big Night” and “Joe Gould’s Secret” — is fascinated by genius and artistic creation. That interest imbues nearly every frame of “Final Portrait.”

Why does Lord put up with Giacometti’s often childish behavior?  Well, he’s a fan. A groupie. He probably hopes some of the artist’s greatness will rub off on him.

But there’s also a weird affection at work, like the way some people admire a bratty kid who gets away with stuff that “responsible” adults  cannot. Artistic genius can lead to misbehavior, sure, but the act of creation carries with it its own sense of forgiveness.

| Robert W. Butler