OVP: At Eternity's Gate (2018)

Film: At Eternity's Gate (2018)
Stars: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Mads Mikkelsen, Oscar Isaac
Director: Julian Schnabel
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actor-Willem Dafoe)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Last year I saw a movie that stuck with me in a way I hadn't anticipated when I first caught it.  Loving Vincent was something glorious to behold as a piece of actual art, recreating with hand-painted animation the most famous works of Vincent van Gogh.  The plotting of the picture occasionally left something to be desired, but the actual film itself literally was so incredible it elicited gasps from the audience.  I left the movie in a state of wonder, and just spent hours in the weeks after looking up all of the paintings-a sign of a strong impact.  Its existence made me curious as to why a live-action biopic was coming out this year focusing on the tortured artist, though considering it was made by Julian Schnabel, it's entirely possible that he started making the film years before anyone had even heard of Loving Vincent.  At Eternity's Gate received a surprise citation for Best Actor at this year's Oscars (most were expecting the fifth nomination to go to either Ethan Hawke or John David Washington), so as we're trying to get through as many of our missing Oscar-nominated films as possible before the ceremony, I figured it was high time we took a look at this back-to-back biopic of the famed Dutch painter.

(This is a pretty famous story-you need a spoiler alert?) The film tells the story of van Gogh's (Dafoe) life largely toward the end of its existence, with little heed paid to his early work as a painter and instead is focused entirely on his downfall & destruction, particularly looking at his relationships with his brother Theo (Friend) and fellow painter Paul Cezanne (Isaac).  The movie plays a bit fast-and-loose with the truth, not least of which by casting the 62-year-old Dafoe as the painter, despite the fact that the real-life van Gogh died at the age of 37, but this isn't meant to be a film taken literally, and frequently it's difficult to tell fact from fiction even within the confines of Schnabel's creation.

This is because the movie itself is shot in a staggered, disjointed pattern that feels less artistic and more "artistic."  In Schnabel's magnum opus The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly it makes sense that the world has a very specific vantage point since it's largely shot from the eyes of a man stuck with locked-in syndrome, so you want to get inside of his specific worldview (this is a film I couldn't stand, for the record, but one where I at least understood some of the creative decisions).  Here, though, there are only occasional shots of this type of vision, where we randomly find ourselves walking into one of van Gogh's paintings (a gimmick better-employed by Loving Vincent), and it seems more like we're getting an indulgent director whom the cinematographer refused to give a flat "no" to some of his worst impulses.

At Eternity's Gate, as a result, is a pretty poor film despite occasional shots of beauty and some solid actors in the foreground.  Dafoe, such a sensitive soul for a man who has spent most of his career playing villains, finds instant humanity in his work as van Gogh, so I get the urge to nominate him, and considering the dreadful decisions Oscar made this year in Best Actor, it's hard to rag on this one too hard.  That said, this is hardly monumental work, with us finding only the most familiar story beats from his work as a tortured artist, and Dafoe (in films like Platoon or The Florida Project) is capable of so much more.  Isaac is also fair, though unknowable as Cezanne, but he's so continually good these days it's hard not to want more from him.  But neither is particularly bad-it's Schnabel's sophomoric direction, like he's shooting a college art film, that makes this film instantly forgettable and regrettable.