At Eternity's Gate

One of the movies I DVRed during one of the free previews in the spring is At Eternity's Gate. It's going to be on TMC Xtra tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, as well as a couple of times next week, if you have the Showtime/TMC package.

Willem Dafoe plays artist Vincent van Gogh, who at the start of the movie is at some sort of meeting of a bunch of starving artists who want to start a collective. Van Gogh is there with his friend Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), a fellow artist who of course would also go on to become famous, and has his own radical ideas of what constitutes art; ideas that are different from van Gogh's which are also radical, just not in the same way.

Vincent isn't a successful artist, at least not in the present; he doesn't sell his paintings but gives them to his brother Theo (Rupert Friend) to try to see; Theo, for his part, supports Vincent as best he can, with Vincent clearly needing some sort of help as his inability to relate to the real world results in something that may or may not be insanity.

Van Gogh winds up in Arles in the south of France, which is where teh bulk of the movie is set, and where van Gogh painted the bulk of his work. He painted extremely rapidly, creating several hundred paintings and a series of sketches in the two years of his life in Arles and a nearby asylum, ultimately dying in the suburbs of Paris not far from where Theo lived.

Those are the more or less well-known public events of van Gogh's life (well, I haven't mentioned the cutting off of his ear yet). Any movie can portray those; indeed, Lust for Life did that extremely well with Kirk Douglas as the doomed artist. At Eternity's Gate takes a different tack, trying to get inside van Gogh's mind and positing what the artist might have been thinking during those last two years.

Dafoe's van Gogh is a man who seems to live more for his art than for anything else in the world, not thinking about how he would support himself, or even what other people think. His attempts to get other people to pose for his painting are presented as crude, as though he had no social graces; this is also suggested as leading to the falling out with Gauguin to which van Gogh responded by cutting off his ear.

As a filmmaking technique, it's not always easy to follow. The movie is also not helped by some of the dialog being in French and a lot in English. (Not that I have a problem with subtitles; it's more that I didn't see any real artistic reason for having the movie in two languages.)

On the other hand, much of the movie is intended to be watched for the visuals as opposed to a linear storyline. In that regard the movie absolutely works. Dafoe, despite being much too old for the part (he was 62 at the time he made the movie while van Gogh died at 37), gives a very good performance trying to get inside the mind of a man who definitely had some sort of mental problem.

At Eternity's Gate is the sort of movie that isn't going to be for everybody. But it deserves to be watched, especially in conjunction with Lust for Life such that one can see two completely different techniques for telling mostly the same story. If you don't have any of the premium cable packages, At Eternity's Gate is available on DVD and Blu-ray.