A Rage to Connect | Dave's Place

At Eternity’s Gate a film by Julian Schnabel. With Willem Dafoe, Rubert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Emmanuelle Seigner. ****1/2

I don’t know how many movies there have been about Vincent Van Gogh, though I myself have seen three or four. I have not seen the 1956 portrayal by Kirk Douglas, and don’t believe I will. Ever since I was a kid and saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I haven’t accepted Douglas in any other role. The scene where he desperately speared a giant squid in the eye—thank God for that guy with the dent in his chin—was his only convincing moment as an actor for me.[1] But surely one of the most unusual choices to portray the artist is the marvelous Willem Dafoe. Van Gogh died of an apparent suicide attempt (though this movie calls that into question) at the age of 37. Dafoe made this movie when he was 62.

I didn’t think about the age difference for one moment, didn’t even bring it to mind until my wife pointed it out after we left. Dafoe has a kind of ageless face, and the battered worried wrinkled face he shows in parts of this film could have been that of a man in his thirties who’d had a hard life. There were moments when Dafoe looked uncannily like portraits of Van Gogh; I think it must have been that resemblance that persuaded Julian Schnabel to cast him. That and the fact that Dafoe is one of the finest actors of our time. He seems to be able to do almost anything, and to improve with age. I actually found this to be a perfect piece of casting.

There’s also the question of why Van Gogh holds such fascination for filmmakers. He was a great artist, of course, utterly unknown and humiliated by a lack of recognition in his lifetime. He also suffered from mental illness, and the connection between mental illness and creativity is an irresistible subject. But Schnabel is the first filmmaker I’ve seen who tried to portray Van Gogh’s mental problems in the way he shot the film. At times during At Eternity’s Gate we see a hazy, blurred reality, which I take to be the way Van Gogh sometimes saw it. There is also a fair amount of frantic and apparently manic behavior, Van Gogh running aimlessly around, or screaming and chasing children who tormented him, or standing amid flowers and feeling the breeze blow through him as they must have, or hearing repeating voices in his head, as he compulsively repeated phrases that bothered him. I don’t know whether Van Gogh actually did those things. But the frantic nature of a number of scenes, with a hand held camera jumping around, seems to duplicate what was going on in the man’s mind. There are theories that Van Gogh was bipolar, and Schnabel seems to present him that way.

He is also portrayed as a man who was desperate for friendship, for love and erotic companionship, human communication of some kind. He does have an intermittent friendship with Paul Gaugin (Oscar Isaac), who appreciates his work but is also somewhat critical of it; the scene where Gaugin puts their friendship on hiatus for a while is one of the most painful in the movie. Van Gogh reacts more or less like a child.

He also longs to have a woman in his life, at one point offers a bar maid (Stella Schnabel) money if she will stay with him. She seems to consider the possibility, but knows he doesn’t have the money. She also tells him quite frankly before he asks that he stinks. The idea, I suppose, is that he cared so much about his art that he didn’t take care of things like taking a bath. But it’s also true that this man who so wanted human companionship also systematically drove it away, in the way he behaved and the way he lived. It was as if no one had taught him how to live. He is like a feral animal.

What the movie seems to be saying—and this is what many of the paintings suggest—is that at his best Van Gogh was a kind of enlightened being; he saw the beauty and the sheer energy and interconnectedness of the world and was trying to show that to people in his work. He was then terribly frustrated when they didn’t find it beautiful. There is a scene where he is sitting and painting the roots of an old tree—he saw beauty everywhere—and some children on a field trip come across him and seem interested; they understand that tree roots are as good a subject as any. But their teacher—who apparently considers herself an art critic—rails against artists who have degraded subject matter, who think they are creating art when their paintings have no beauty, and in her criticism we seem to hear that of the petty French bourgeoisie all over the country. They didn’t see what the man was doing, painting the energy that sparkles in everything.

What his painting often reminds me of—here is where I show myself to be an artistic nitwit—is the work of Huichol Indians that I saw and sometimes purchased in Mexico, work done under the influence of peyote. It apparently involves a private iconography, but does seem to exhibit the energy in everything, even in the air between objects, which is as vibrant and colorful as anything else.

I was startled that Schnabel actually showed Van Gogh painting, and found those scenes convincing. I was less convinced by his casual dialogue, where he said profound things about art, sometimes as he worked. I don’t doubt that Van Gogh thought such things, or wrote them (I’ve read a selection of his letters to his beloved brother Theo, who supported him), but I do wonder if he spoke them aloud, off the cuff, especially a moment when he speculates that he was born too soon, and that his work will eventually find its audience. That’s the problem with movie dialogue about the life of any artist. Scripts are made of dialogue. But we have to believe that a human being spoke those words.

Rupert Friend beautifully portrays Theo Van Gogh, and his deep love and respect for his brother. The tenderness of those scenes is immensely touching. He seems to be the one human being who never gave up on Vincent, though he also found a way to keep a certain distance. I don’t think anyone could have lived with the man round the clock.

Then there’s the final question that all such movies ask: was he great despite or because of his mental illness. I vote for despite: he was fighting not only the sheer difficulty of what he wanted to do, but also the demons that plagued him when he wasn’t doing it. He himself says—in another one of those lines of suspect dialogue—that he was really only happy when he painted. In any case, what we see is the terribly sad situation of a man who wants desperately to communicate with the world and who can’t seem to do it, even though he was doing it, beautifully, through his art. But people didn’t see that at the time. It was as if he were saying one brilliant and beautiful thing after another, but nobody listened.

[1] I was six years old at the time.