On At Eternity's Gate

What did Vincent Van Gogh sound like? I can’t imagine him talking, yet as his most recent incarnation, Willem Dafoe does a lot of it. I guess my reaction is a testament to how powerfully Van Gogh’s work speaks for him, and as tempting a subject for filmmaking as he is, it is difficult to imagine a movie doing his work — and, intrinsically, him — justice.

At Eternity’s Gate manages to tribute Van Gogh with earnestness and respect. The dimensions of his instability are treated from a distance; we never really are certain of what he’s done even as all sorts of rumors proliferate regarding his actions. Director Julian Schnabel frames the artist as he is generally understood to have been: a sort of mystic, touched by a profound sensitivity to his surroundings that alienated him from his contemporaries and sentenced him to posthumous admiration. Van Gogh is a great martyr in our culture, a breathing tragedy of genius preyed upon as much by the ignorance of those around him as his own violent consciousness.

Dafoe embodies his subject with frank serenity, behind which inaccessible darkness threatens to overwhelm. He plays the man as his age, familiar with that darkness and all the more humbled by its inescapable forcefulness. Really, such a man can only overwhelm, which is what I feel as I write this. It is impossible to explore this person without losing some sense of balance, so I give Dafoe credit for having captured Van Gogh’s consciousness without contorting himself to do so.

All this said, the film is ultimately underwhelming. Schnabel and his fellow screenwriters tend to hit their dramatic points a bit too on the nose, such that they contradict the vast profundity of the man whose life they’re dramatizing. Van Gogh emerges as a victim of insensitivity and carelessness, and the historical facts are updated in this telling to match new information we have regarding his death (I was unaware and deeply surprised to learn these facts). This film may be best viewed as yet another attempt in our evolving society to understand Vincent — to not only admire, but to justify him. As if — and this, in my eyes, is the point that every thus-far produced movie of his life misses — he needed any justification.