At Eternity's Gate

2018 biopic

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A look at the last weeks of Vincent Van Gogh's life.

Like a good biopic, this at least focuses on a small slice of the subject's life, this one dealing with his final weeks when he was chopping off ears and painting surprisingly prolifically. Dafoe's now played Jesus and Bobby Peru, and Van Gogh at this stage in his life is probably somewhere in between the two of them. He's good, especially in how the artist's inner struggles are made palpable. Dafoe looks like a painter, and he looks like he's being tortured by unseen demons.

Unfortunately, I got a little tired of the avant-garde touches this leans heavily on to try to get the viewer into the artist's noodle. All the wacky camera angles, the blurs, and the out-of-focus shots did a lot of the heavy lifting early, and while it helps the audience see the world as Van Gogh might have seen it, it got a little tiresome. It's sort of Julian Schnabel's thing, I guess, and the visual trickery worked well in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because there was a consistency. Here, it's less consistent. I thought this movie was really lively when Dafoe's Van Gogh was at peace and working, and it sort of sank when he was not. The stumbling was very likely part of the point.

Things get way too talky once Mads Mikkelsen shows up for a lengthy conversation so that Dafoe can spell out everything that we probably should have gotten from the performance and the visuals anyway. Oscar Isaac is also in this, and he plays friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin. That relationship intrigued, and it was cool to learn that Van Gogh actually chopped off his ear for a dude instead of a prostitute like I'd always heard.

There really are some lovely shots in this--dead sunflowers are particularly stunning, and I could watch wind-blown grasses like that on the big screen all day.