At Eternity's Gate (Julien Schnabel, 2018)

The real question here is, do we really need another film about the Vincent Van Gogh story? While there's no denying his stellar achievements or his influence on the modern art that followed in his wake, Van Gogh has become so ingrained in the global consciousness as a story that it becomes harder and harder to see the paintings themselves. What's more, the particular circumstances of his autobiography fit so neatly with a dominant perception of what a true Artist is -- mad, driven, abused, impoverished, unappreciated in his lifetime -- that is becomes difficult to see which came first, the Romantic ideology or the Vincent legend. 

Part of why At Eternity's Gate is such a mess is because you can detect Schnabel and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière struggling against the very constraints of the popular conceptions of Van Gogh, trying to focus on the materialist matters that concern any intelligent artist. Unlike so many films about artists, At Eternity's Gate actually pays attention to the perception of light, the physical application of paint, and the complications in translating one to the other. There are an admirable number of quiet moments of observation in this film, although not quite as many as in Altman's Vincent and Theo. 

But Tatiana Lisovkaia's tinkling score ruins those moments almost entirely. It practically serves as an apology to the viewer for having to endure them, for being asked to think about light. Schnabel, throughout his career, has always had conflicting tendencies, wanting to dive into the visual work of simply pushing paint but also needing to be understood by the many rather than the few. So for every decision that augments his firmly grounded image of Van Gogh -- Benoît Delhomme's sweeping, muscular cinematography, for example -- there's something in the script that cheapens or over-explains, like the didactic interlude in which Van Gogh talks about his favorite painters of the tradition, an edifying moment that seems beamed in from a different film.

Ultimately this doesn't work because one sense that the makers wanted to make a film about art and felt the need to use Van Gogh as the hook. (See also: Basquiat.) Willem Dafoe delivers an appreciably muted semi-performance, but the construction of the film works against the development of a character per se. This could be a virtue, if Schnabel leaned into the exteriority, the primacy of the work. But instead he dutifully doles out the details of the biography -- the asylum, the ear, the suicide -- because it's presumed that's what we came to see. The end result is an intellectual bus ride, contemplative yet hitting all its designated stops. And maybe that's all we can ever expect Van Gogh to be at this point: a cultural figure stranded at the narrative junction of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Quince Tree of the Sun.