At Eternity’s Gate | Julian Schnabel | NYFF 2018
“Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)” is best known as the famous painting done by Vincent van Gogh, and now At Eternity’s Gate is also a new film based on the final years of the painter’s life.
Directed by American painter and director Julian Schnabel off of a script that Schnabel co-wrote with Louise Kugelberg and Jean-Claude Carrière based upon recent Van Gogh biographers Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh’s theories that his death wasn’t a suicide but rather mischief.
Willem Dafoe is a perfect casting decision as Van Gogh, completely submerging himself into the role and playing the fractured nature to perfection. Schnabel doesn’t dabble in traditional plot points of an expected biopic.
This isn’t a start to finish look at the life of the famed yet troubled painter, but rather a musing of a latter period of the painter’s life where he ponders questioning of meaning and philosophy of being a painter and being alive, rather than how he got to that point. Many of these conversations come with Oscar Isaac as fellow artist Paul Gauguin who seems to be at a similar place as Van Gogh, but with a much sturdier grip on life as not only an artist but as a person.
The episodic way that the scenes are laid out by Schnabel gives the film a fractured feeling that may be meant to give us a look into the mind of this artist who was quite frankly all over the map mentally. But this storytelling decision, along with the artistic free-flowing approach that it takes never allowed me to truly connect with Van Gogh or breakthrough with this story on a level more than just surface.
The big selling point here is the performance from Dafoe, who proves yet again that he’s one of the strongest working actors today, always giving a mighty performance whenever he shows up on-screen. He is absolutely phenomenal as Van Gogh and is largely the reason anything works at all.
While the way it all unfolds on-screen felt puzzling and unsatisfying, it’s hard to ignore the beautiful way that Schnabel and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme capture it all in an artistic, painting-esque fashion that radiates with the frazzled mindset of van Gogh himself.
It’s just a shame that At Eternity’s Gate never finds this same vision in terms of plot to reel the viewer in and give us more of a reason to care than just because it’s a film about a historical figure that we’re supposed to care about in a more well-rounded way.
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