AT ETERNITY'S GATE 12/10/18

Julian Schnabel’s new film AT ETERNITY’S GATE is indelibly moving from the moment we hear murmuring voices in the first darkened frame - portending the interior struggle, and psychic agitation of the painter, Vincent Van Gogh, a haunted artist who tames the turbulence of his mind by the act of painting, assuaging “nature” into patterned marks of tactile, luminous beauty merging his whole being physically and piously with the subject. Since Schnabel is an artist himself, this “portrait” of Van Gogh is different from previous depictions, particularly in the singular way the film is shot,  and the understanding of his character. We “see” Vincent as a man who is sanely insane; a man who has the clarity to organize and penetrate the world around him, and a man who is suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness - one which he achingly endures. The movie instills in the viewer a profound empathy and recognition of his persistence in creating exquisite paintings despite a life of bleakness and despair; making art was digesting and breathing in life.

Willem Dafoe's performance as Vincent Van Gogh is heart-wrenchingly melancholy as we literally step into his shoes - (the camera often attached to him) as he rushes wildly through the reeds, blinded by the mistral winds howling, the dry, dying sunflowers with bent heads streak and fly around in front of our eyes as we sense the brutality of the elements and the dank coldness of desolation. Often the camera lens is foggy as if the artist’s tears obscure and humanize his vision.

We first meet Vincent in Paris as he dreams of a community of artists that live and work together, a yearning that is totally unrealistic given his idiosyncratic temperament. Except for the deeply felt relationship with his devoted patron/businessman brother Theo, only Paul Gauguin is responsive to his artwork which seems “ugly” and “unrealistic” to other onlookers. Gauguin played by Oscar Isaac, (regrettably did not seem well cast - lacking the charisma and heft of a Gauguin) recommends that he leave Paris and go south to Arles. He listens to his advice and is flung into the most passionate period of his short artistic life.

Schnabel conveys Vincent’s love of southern France as the camera pauses, lingers and then meanders through the countryside - the blinding light is contrasted with the “yellow” room that Van Gogh rents, monastically furnished with finished wet paintings, hung on the wall. Like an animal that has found his natural habitat, Vincent spends most days outdoors and we observe him sensuously outstretched flat on his back, intoxicatedly dribbling moist soil over his face and body - an animate internment. Being productive and frenetically heady as the sun beat down on him, Van Gogh’s periods of lapses of memory, and whatever incidents occurred during those spells become more prevalent. After several episodes which are never depicted or explained - a mystery to Vincent and to us - he is sent to  Saint-Rémy de Provence an asylum for the mentally ill where he spends one year feverishly painting. 

Throughout AT ETERNITY’S GATE,  I delightedly watched  Dafoe’s slender long fingers, his skull-like face encasing dark, vivid eyes working - the brush touching the canvas with a “lightness of being.” Julian Schnabel has unearthed some new information as to how Vincent Van Gogh died so the end is perhaps a revelation, perhaps fiction, but I sensed the truth of it - in light of Van Gogh’s steamy affair with art. Whatever demons he desperately fought, Van Gogh was able to paint the surrounding world with a directness and lucidity of a man in control of his destiny. I left the theater thinking this was no romanticized/mythologized bio-pic but a person that I, as a fellow artist could relate to - could understand and could (dare I say) love.