128 years after his death, Vincent Van Gogh is understood perhaps more as an archetype than a flesh and blood man. While his paintings are widely viewed and celebrated, the mythos of his life – his inner torment, his contemporary neglect, the ear incident – has taken such hold in the popular imagination that even for the majority who care little about painting, Van Gogh is the patron saint of the misunderstood and the misbegotten, for anyone who feels they’re working not for their peers but for future generations. In “At Eternity’s Gate,” the new exploration of Van Gogh from painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) is returned to his human dimensions, by a keen script and wonderful lead performance, while still being held up as an example of the artist’s ability to transcend time.
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Schnabel has said in the press that he didn’t want to make a film about Van Gogh, but a film where the viewer is Van Gogh and he largely succeeds on that front, using a variety of styles to align the audience with Van Gogh’s thought. Both the film and Van Gogh are at their happiest alone in nature, in a state of reverie as Van Gogh develops his belief that “God is nature, nature is beauty.” Schnabel allows the audience inside of Van Gogh’s gaze, seeing the raw material of the French countryside as his consciousness is transforming it into his now-familiar, then-strange paintings. The most powerful element in the film is the enormous chasm between the beauty Van Gogh sees as he looks out at the world and the fearful, uncomprehending manner in which the rural French look back at him. Where Van Gogh looks and sees beauty and eternity, the world looks back at him and sees a troublemaking vagrant, an object of ridicule and scorn.
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Dafoe plays Van Gogh as gentle and fearful, but susceptible to explosive fits, and his interactions with others take on a tragic hue as his intentions are misunderstood time and again, sometimes leading to institutionalization. Other than his saintly brother and benefactor Theo (Rupert Friend), his only friend in the art world is Paul Gauguin (Oscar Issac). Gauguin visits Van Gogh in Arles for a happy interlude of painting and banter, but the needy Van Gogh can’t take it when Gauguin travels on. As seen in the scenes with Gauguin (who delights in dismissing peers like Renoir), Schnabel takes care to situate Van Gogh’s painting in its historical context, showing him grapple with influences and develop his technique of painting in one clear gesture. One scene cleverly uses high contrast black and white to show the dense texture of Van Gogh’s paint on a canvas, the profusion of material that Gauguin chides as sculpture.
Schnabel further elaborates his themes in two long dialogue scenes with a doctor and a priest, men who are professionally obligated to help the puzzling artist. They both investigate why Van Gogh acts the way he does, the doctor focusing on specifics and the priest focusing on more existential questions. The conversation with the priest (Mads Mikkelsen) is especially satisfying, as Van Gogh elaborates how his artistry and his religious feelings are intertwined. The dialogue sometimes feels a bit too on the nose (“I feel like I’m painting for people who haven’t been born yet”), but in Van Gogh’s defense of his work in the face of the priest’s patient explanations that the paintings are objectively bad, the audience can feel the approaching headwinds of the twentieth century. Van Gogh’s fierce commitment to his personal vision started to open the door that the twentieth century artists who followed would kick down, leading to the creative anarchy of the visual arts in the twentieth century. As he tells the priest, “life is for sowing, the harvest is not yet here.” [A-]
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