At Eternity’s Gate

How do you translate to the big screen, the enigmatic existence of the patron saint of troubled, misunderstood, born before their time artists? The answer is you can’t. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a shot, and in At Eternity’s Gate director Julian Schnabel and star Willem Dafoe, do just that. They attempt to get inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh. They let us see through his eyes and feel through his skin.

Much like Van Gogh’s art, the movie has a dreamlike, post-impressionistic quality, in both the way its shot and the way it's structured. The narrative is not linear. It often folds upon itself and takes spatiotemporal jumps which recontextualize scenes that we have already seen. Words are spoken in both English and French, often times within the same scene by the same people. The camerawork is almost exclusively handheld and mostly erratic. At least half of the film is shot subjectively from the perspective of Van Gogh. The rest of the time Willem Dafoe’s captivating face fills up the entire frame. The sound design is at first ethereal, almost as if your hearing nature speak to you as it spoke to Van Gogh. Then as Van Gogh’s mind starts to slip, we start to hear the cacophony of confusion and fear echoing inside his head. All this time Willem Dafoe is being his faultless best. He doesn’t play Van Gogh as the cliched irascible genius. Instead, he goes for the undeniable vulnerability and sensitivity that each great artist must have. He plays a man who probably understood the world better than anyone has ever done yet is unable to communicate what he understands to his contemporaries. He plays a man who experiences emotions that probably lie beyond the spectrum available to us ordinary plebians yet is unable to express what he feels if it's not on a canvas.

Other than Dafoe, there are great performances by Rupert Friend as Van Gogh’s brother, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, and Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin. None of them have fully fleshed out characters and serve only in support of Van Gogh. But nevertheless, they all help color in the finer details of the incredible portrait of Van Gogh being painted by Dafoe and Schnabel.

If there is one complaint, it’s that the script fails to rise to the level of all the other elements of the movie. At times it felt that the movie might have been better had it been made without an actual screenplay and just relied on images and sounds. The dialogue is not necessarily bad but often feels obtrusive to the aims of the rest of the movie. It often feels like a necessary speed bump that we must jump over to get to the place where we are headed. It is a little expository and a little too prescient for the time: Van Gogh literally says that maybe the people who would appreciate his gift haven’t been born yet. I am also not sure how I feel about the Marvel-like easter eggs and references about the nineteenth-century French art scene.