'At Eternity's Gate': Film Review | Venice 2018. Earth falls onto his eyes. His earlier struggles and professional and personal disappointments are often expressed obliquely and in Dafoe’s feverish eyes and attitude. Like Ingmar Bergman, van Gogh was the son of a pastor. “He really takes no pleasure in life, walking around with head bent,” his mother reported. “In the life of the painter, death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing,” he once wrote to Theo. As the movie opens, we hear a monologue (on a black screen), where Van Gogh muses "I'd like to be just like the others", but of course he is not. By Caryn James 19th November 2018. Thousands throng the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, and the stubborn fantasy that he somehow belongs to us is nicely enshrined in an episode of “Doctor Who,” from 2010, when Vincent (Tony Curran) is spun through time and space to the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, to a room lined with paintings, where he hears a curator (Bill Nighy) extoll him as “the most popular great painter of all time.” Hold on, there’s more: “Not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Yikes. The correct version, for him as for most other Americans, is “van Go,” and the joke is that none of them are right. by Scott Phillips. Often dressed in a blue shirt, he carries an easel, brushes and paint strapped to his back, trudging in light that changes from golden to wintry blue. What this pleasing confusion shows is how zealously van Gogh has been appropriated. At Eternity’s Gate review – Van Gogh biopic fades to grey The visual vibrancy of Julian Schnabel’s rendering of the painter’s last years isn’t matched by his handling of the … Tweet. A family of Dutch peasants settles down to a meal. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Comments 3. If Douglas is the most self-torturing of van Goghs, Dafoe the most readily enraptured, and Roth the one that you’d least want to meet on a dark night, what should we make of Jacques Dutronc, in Pialat’s “Van Gogh”? Subscribe for more content. The innkeeper asks what he should do with the two paintings that Vincent gave him. Kirk Douglas, seldom a relaxed performer, launches into the role of van Gogh and switches to maximum clench. He gathers handfuls of soil and sprinkles it over his face. Home REVIEWS ARTICLES TRAILERS CALENDAR PROFILES ABOUT Our Services « previous. He quickly begins creating a simple painting of them; the original now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. next » At Eternity’s Gate. Some of the strongest scenes in the film are set there, in shades of dirt brown and soot black, like the artist’s drawings of the period; at one point, he descends into a mine. He adds: I mean, when one wants to paint a head, say, and one looks closely at the nature one has before one, then one might think, this head is a harmony of reddish brown, violet, yellow, all broken—I’ll put a violet and a yellow and a reddish brown on my palette, and break them into each other. To moviegoers, the legacy that he bequeaths is a mixed one. To browse a volume of the correspondence is to wade through ruminations on color, blooming on almost every page. Yet his van Gogh is an extraordinary creature, precisely because he seems so ordinary: thin, thoughtful, sorry for the trouble that he causes now and then, but graced with a quiet sense of humor, and perfectly capable, when his health allows, of enjoying himself. Schnabel and Dafoe sensitively convey the artist’s desire to “paint what I feel and feel what I paint.”. A committee calls him in and informs him that he has been rejected for the ministry. It seems almost impossible, or maybe foolish, that anyone would take on another biography of van Gogh, who died in 1890 at 37. “It’s not so much a golden as an iron age for painters,” Vincent wrote, and, of all the movies about him, it is the least shining, Pialat’s “Van Gogh,” that tells the most iron truths, and has the courage to conceive of art as work. Share on Twitter . The potato sequence is cleverly done, though the ploy could get out of hand; good luck with finding olive trees as writhingly gnarled as van Gogh’s. The ancient notion of creativity as a species of divine madness is reborn, above all, in van Gogh. By Cate Marquis | January 25, 2019. He spies the artist, who is feverishly drawing haystacks in a field. To learn of his early years is to discern a pattern of ambitions unfulfilled, of private entanglements that turned sour, and of schemes that were embarked on and dropped. After he takes a small canvas (“Landscape With Snow”) out of his bag, the skittish camera pans from the painting to his feet and up his body, and then settles on his furrowed face. Isn’t the illusion of movement in the cypress—its energy rooted and withheld, the thrust and sway of it eternally about to happen—all the more vital for being trapped so thrillingly in paint? That may be practical given the number of featured canvases, but it is also strikingly arrogant to paint over, as it were, van Gogh. Near the end of the film, we don’t watch the painter pass away. Other artists, some of the loftiest rank, are known by their first names: Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Nor are the English, who plump for a cozy “van Goff.” Let’s be honest: we will never be sufficiently glottal. #FrameRate #AtEternity'sGate # ReviewFrame Rate presents the review of Julian Schnabel's latest film, At Eternity's Gate, by Reece and Ivo No special effect, however costly, and no closeup, however intimate, can rival the layering of oils into a sticky paintscape, although, Lord knows, directors have tried. The giveaway is the eyebrows—carrot-colored now, but still as bushy as ever—and the passionate speed of the chatter, though what a wise guy from Queens is doing in nineteenth-century Provence is anyone’s guess. Full review Instead of relying on reams of exposition, Schnabel introduces this period by focusing on Vincent’s face and body, underlining his physicality and the material conditions that help shape his sense of self and art. By the time Vincent brushes on gobs of yellow and red, a man, a room and a world have come into visual and sensual focus. NYC.com, the authentic city site, also offer a comprehensive Movies section. “Lust for Life” is based on a novel of 1934 by Irving Stone. We are schooled in multiple stories of van Gogh, and bemused by the range of available Vincents. Schnabel draws on the historical record when it suits him, including by pulling lines from van Gogh’s letters. But that won’t do for van Gogh, or for anyone else, which is why, in “Vincent & Theo,” Altman goes nuts among the sunflowers. I’ll stick with Pialat, who, typically, has van Gogh stumble into view with a bloodstained belly, and without explanation or complaint. How dare anyone defame a great artist with accusations of normality?) Meanwhile, there is much to do. You can almost see it flicker. A painter himself, he wants us to observe things through a painter’s unblinking eyes. Fierily devout, he sought to follow his father into the church. Dafoe’s thin, coiled physicality suggests both fragility and determination, while his tensile face flutters with an astonishment of emotions that, by turns, suggest a yielding or off-putting sensibility. A year before, to the day, his mother had given birth to a first Vincent, who did not survive. September 2018 im Rahmen der Filmfestspiele von Venedig ihre Weltpremiere feierte, am 16. The story then flips to Paris and settles into its primary time frame with Vincent and his younger brother Theo (a moving Rupert Friend), whose close friendship and money sustain him. We would have summoned medication and therapeutic care for his afflicted brain. Strikingly, though, his interest has a rare quality of tenderness to it, perhaps because, unlike most filmmakers who make movies about great artists, he is fundamentally preoccupied with art itself. The effect is unnerving—a kind of neurotic pastoral—and, like the shepherdess, we’re not sure how to react. Dafoe is one of the founding members of The Wooster Group, the New York based experimental theatre collective. I loved this film. ... Manohla Dargis writing for The New York Times gave the film a strong review stating that the film is, "a vivid, intensely affecting portrait of Vincent van Gogh toward the end of his life, the artist walks and walks. At Eternity’s Gate is not a standard biopic — we’ve had a few of those already, including Lust for Life and Vincent and Theo. But van Gogh is the one. Rocko Santana Reviews. The world is Vincentified, and the painting is brought to life. Dafoe, with his surprising, sometimes terrifying mouth, and his skull visible beneath skin as tightly stretched as canvas, has one of cinema’s great faces, and Schnabel makes delicate use of both its ragged beauty and expressive range. In “Vincent,” a ravishing documentary of 1987, strewn with paintings and drawings, John Hurt, in his softly scalding voice, reads out passages from the letters of van Gogh. "At Eternity's Gate" (2018 release; 110 min.) Use the HTML below. Man, it appears, can live by paint alone. An industry, a revenue stream, a case history, a cautionary tale, and a cult: he is all these, and there are moments, amid the clamor, when the paintings and the drawings struggle to be heard. It’s at this juncture that we first catch sight of him, in “Lust for Life.” A door opens to reveal Kirk Douglas, as van Gogh, seated on a chair. Van Gogh An der Schwelle zur Ewigkeit (Originaltitel At Eternity's Gate) ist eine Filmbiografie von Julian Schnabel, die am 3. REVIEW: At Eternity’s Gate (2018) One of the best films I have ever seen about art is Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biographical drama Basquiat , which related the brief career of its titular New York contemporary artist. When, during a riverside stroll, among friends, on a Sunday afternoon, Vincent suddenly peels away and falls into the water, like a tired child collapsing into bed, he is fished out without a fuss, and the lazy day flows on. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. He begs for any post that will allow him to answer his vocation, and is dispatched to the Borinage, a poor coal-mining area of Belgium, as a lay preacher. We realize that he is making preliminary sketches for “The Potato Eaters,” of 1885, and that the filmmaker, no less busy, is reconstituting the painting as accurately as can be. Schnabel’s movie feeds on that élan. The air is not joyous but oppressive, and van Gogh, standing there at his easel, admits defeat, grabbing the picture and stamping on it as if he were putting out a fire. For decades, it was accepted that he shot himself, and the movies concurred with the biographers; if Kirk Douglas used a gun, it must be true. Film Review: At Eternity’s Gate. At Eternity's Gate, in its best moments, is an intoxicating experience. In At Eternity’s Gate, Schnabel channels the artist’s use of two complementary colors in some outdoor scenes, with verdant greens meeting blue skies, flaxen fields undulating in the breeze as the artist traipses through bucolic vistas with an easel on his back. That toothy grin is unmistakable, as is the deep, confiding tone with which Dafoe recites the words of van Gogh, in voice-over. It is only fitting that filmmakers of distinction should, over the past seventy years, have taken up the cause of van Gogh. They are spared the herculean horror of trying to say his last name, and the pitfalls of cultural snobbery that surround it. Maurice Pialat, needless to say, is immune to considerations of greatness—a rhetorical varnish that, despite its gleam, shows us nothing new. A musical star in France, Dutronc is little known elsewhere, and his acting credits are sparse. Share on Facebook Share on Linkedin. Share using Email. To howl at this or any of the other liberties that Schnabel takes in “At Eternity’s Gate,” though, is to miss the point: The movie is a freely subjective portrait of van Gogh by another artist trying to see, paint and feel as he did. Head bowed, he looks like a man on a mission, though at other times he seems more like a man at prayer. Few painters, though, have been more verbally profuse, and the letters that he sent to Theo, more than six hundred in all, have no equal as a testament of artistic faith, nagging away at the problems of artistic representation. Film is a flat skin, or, latterly, an aggregation of pixels, and what it lacks is texture. Vincent’s agonies render moot the age difference between the character and actor; Dafoe is 63, and his deepest creases can seem like evidence of Vincent’s current and past suffering. That, at any rate, is the movie’s mission, and, despite the dazzle of its technical accomplishment, you can’t help wondering what it’s for. Yet the idea of him as a sort of hobo-saint will not be dispelled. Dafoe Mesmerizes as the Misunderstood Painter Maybe God made me a painter for people who haven’t been born yet. At Eternity's Gate is about a man who enjoys being engulfed by emotion. We know it’s him, because he sports a straw hat and a bandage round his head: the standard accoutrements of any onscreen Vincent. At one point, Vincent says that a “grain of madness is the best of art,” an observation borrowed from one of his missives. He hunches, as if still steeling himself against the cold, and the wind bangs open and shut the window that brings dim, blue light into the small, shabby room. We should leave van Gogh to the Dutch, from whose lips “Gogh” emerges as a two-part catarrhal feast. But is he listing what he actually saw, or what was vouchsafed to him in the euphoric act of seeing? He has been anointed—and travestied—as the ideal of the modern artist, even by those for whom art, modern or otherwise, is at best a diversion and at worst a scam. “Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheatfields have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold, green, red and yellow bronze,” van Gogh writes, recounting what he has painted at the height of the mistral. And the wife has gotta have this big dumb grin, right across her map. He specialized in sweaty biographical fiction, dense with fashionable psychodrama, and dedicated to the theory that art is the best and the only way to answer—and, God willing, to allay—the demands of your demons, as if they were shareholders in your spiritual corporation. A look at the life of painter Vincent van Gogh during … Across the room sits the artist, capturing the occasion on paper. The women wear stiff and elaborate headgear: patches of white in the humble gloom. Who said that the wheat field was short of life in the first place? It may be that van Gogh, whose relations with his family were fraught, chose his signature as a rebuff, loath to present himself as a van Gogh. To revisit this article, select My Account, then. Die neuesten Looks, Trends und die Highlight-Outfits der Saison findest du in den Kollektionen unserer New Yorker-Marken Amisu, Smog, Fishbone und Censored. Yet by adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art. Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” starring Willem Dafoe, stands in a lineage of movies that use the painter’s tortured life to probe the nature of art. 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