At Eternity’s Gate
Starring Willem Dafoe, Oscar Isaac, Rupert Friend, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Mads Mikkelsen
Directed by Julian Schnabel
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
[rating: 4/5]
There’s a scene some way into Julian Schnabel’s film At Eternity’s Gate where Vincent Van Gogh is discussing his work with fellow painter Paul Gauguin. Gauguin wants to calm him and advises him to maintain more focus when he’s painting. Van Gogh fires back at him, “I need to go out and work to forget myself…I want to be out of control…I don’t want to calm down!” With these words, delivered like a starter pistol, Schnabel establishes his own approach. Narrative balance is not his style, and it never has been. His filmography is full of films projected to keep us off balance. Look at The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, a startingly claustrophobic piece that examined the internal struggle of a stroke victim. Once his hero goes down, Schnabel felt the only way for us to appreciate the condition was to take us quite literally inside the man and give us his view. He does the same here. Willem Dafoe, who unfairly just lost a Best Actor Oscar for his blood and guts performance as Van Gogh, clearly keyed into his director’s frequency and the result is one of his most chameleonic creations. Consider his gummy freak in Wild at Heart, Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, his haunting He in Anti-Christ. Dafoe is always on the hunt for a character he can surrender to and his interpretation is exceptional.
When we first meet Van Gogh, he’s well and truly saddled with the afflictions that confused his mind and, from what we see here, informed his artistic bent. Was he schizophrenic? A manic-depressive? Unstable? An alcoholic? A misunderstood genius? All of the above if the gamut he runs here is to be believed. To quote Wikipedia, his “troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist”. Despite the number of times he’s been dramatised, and in each his levels of sanity are always the centrepiece, Schnabel probably gets us closer to who and how the man was than ever before. As with The Diving Bell, we see and feel everything as the hero does; such is the intimacy of the film, his realisations become ours. He glorifies in the sheer, insurmountable beauty of nature and the faces of those around him. It is common knowledge now that his work wasn’t the result so much of technique but rather of his reaction to his subjects. With one of them, his fervour is so acute, he nearly breaks her arm getting her into posing position. Dafoe never tries to garner empathy; he’s too consumed by Van Gogh’s passion.
In keeping with the subject, Schnabel delivers a stylised work, one of art (the colours are strikingly rich) and the near uncontrollable passion that comes with it. Benoit Delhomme’s cinematography style forms a direct correlation with the subject. When Van Gogh is frantic, when he’s angry, when he’s steady, when he’s woozy, Delhomme matches him. But most importantly, he captures the resulting canvases and brings them alive. Watch for the scene where he meets Madame Ginoux (where has Emmanuelle Seigner been?). She stares right down the camera as she talks to him and before he’s even attempted a brushstroke (it was to be one of his most loved portraits), Delhomme has done all the heavy lifting. At Eternity’s Gate is a three-hander. Ironically, and you know where its heading (where else for such a tragic artist?), the end doesn’t leave you shattered the way such tales usually do. We know what happened next.
