Butler's Cinema Scene

Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh

“AT ETERNITY’S GATE” My rating: A-

110 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-12

Epically poetic yet aching personal, “At Eternity’s Gate” may be the best film ever about Vincent  Van Gogh.

For that matter, it is among the best movies ever made about a visual artist. Undoubtedly much of the insight and emotion radiating off the screen can be traced back to writer/director Julian Schnabel who was, of course, a famed painter long  before he began  making films.

Visually lush and aurally haunting, “At Eternity’s Gate” follows Vincent through the last year or so of his life.

It is told in fragmented fashion, with scenes built around a series of dialogues between Vincent (Willem Dafoe in the best performance of his career) and others: his supportive brother Theo (Rupert Friend), his combative fellow painter Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), a fellow patient in a mental institution (Niels Arestrup), a disapproving priest (Mads Mikkelsen), a sympathetic physician (Mathieu Amalric).

And when he’s not talking, this Vincent is painting, creating before our eyes the colorful masterpieces that would not be appreciated until long after his death at age 37. A good chunk of “At Eternity’s Gate” is devoted to following Vincent on his nature walks, easel and canvasses strapped to his back, head shaded with a floppy straw hat.

This is a transcendental Vincent, a man who stands in the sunshine with his arms outstretched, smiling ecstatically at the light that bathes him.

Our first encounter with this Vincent, though, occurs in darkness. We can only hear his voice. He’s talking about loneliness, about how he feels set apart from the rest of humanity: “I just want to be one of them…I’d like them to give me some tobacco, a glass of wine, or even ask: ‘How are you?’…from time to time I’d make a sketch of one of them as a gift.”

The key to Dafoe’s inspiring, heartbreaking performance is the way in which Vincent’s almost religious love affair with the world’s beauty is undercut by his sad “otherness.”  Most people don’t like him. They make fun of him. His eccentricities, poverty and neediness bring out the worst in his fellow man. (An art dealer of my acquaintance once explained that “Everybody wants a Van Gogh in their dining room; nobody wants Van Gogh in their  dining room.”)

Thus he’s an apologetic mystic, aware that he rubs others the wrong way, but unable to escape the almost epileptic thrall into which he is forever being plunged by the beauty of the world around him.

Most film biographies allow us to look in on their subjects.  “At Eternity’s Gate” is their polar opposite, for we find ourselves inside Vincent looking out.

Yeah, that sounds pretty touchy-feely, but there’s no other way to describe this movie’s overwhelming empathy. Through Dafoe’s intense yet weirdly calming performance, we share the artist’s wonder, we feel through him the “vibrating energy speaking in God’s voice.”

He’s driven to create art whether or not it’s appreciated by he world at large.

“I’ll show what I see to my brothers who can’t see it…I can make people feel what it’s like to be alive.”

As for his enduring poverty,  Vincent can only hope there’s a purpose to the suffering: “Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet.”

Employing handheld cameras and a colorful palette that almost leaps off the screen, Schnabel imbues his best scenes with what I can only describe as “calm energy.”  That description also applies to Tatiana Lisovkaia’s musical score, haunting compositions featuring a percussive piano and the occasional ethereal violin.

This Vincent may be mad, but it’s a thrilling, beautiful madness. Suffering, sure, but so much glory.

| Robert W. Butler