海角大神

鈥淚 am my paintings,鈥� says Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe in a career-best performance, in Julian Schnabel鈥檚 鈥淎t Eternity鈥檚 Gate,鈥� which follows the artist through his last tumultuous and astonishingly prolific years in the late 1880s in the south of France. Watching this explosively lyrical film, you can believe it. I must admit that my first reaction to seeing yet another movie about Van Gogh was not welcoming, especially since several of these, including 鈥淟ust for Life鈥� and Robert Altman鈥檚 鈥淰incent & Theo,鈥� are so good. Wasn鈥檛 it just last year that we had the entirely hand-drawn animated 鈥淟oving Vincent鈥�? What鈥檚 left to do: 鈥淰incent: The Musical鈥�?

Schnabel is, of course, a celebrated artist as well as a powerful, if powerfully uneven, filmmaker, and what he captures here is what it must have been like to be Van Gogh. It鈥檚 an artist鈥檚 imagining of what another artist might have felt. He never does break away from the romantic, madness-of-genius clich茅 that has dogged so many movies and commentaries about Van Gogh. Instead, he embraces it because he believes it authenticates the turmoil that goes into creating great art. Of course, turmoil can also create bad art, but such is Schnabel鈥檚 ardor that I bought into the banality even though I think Van Gogh was a great artist despite rather than because of his mental anguish.

Much of Van Gogh鈥檚 spoken words in the movie are drawn from his letters, and their passion matches up with the paintings. In the film, he talks about how he needs to be in a fever in order to paint, and there are moments, such as Vincent walking into the bright golden Saint-R茅my at dawn with his easel and brushes, when I could feel his almost pantheistic communion with nature. 鈥淚 feel God is nature and nature is beauty,鈥� he says, and this intensity is transferred directly onto the canvas.聽

Vincent lays the paint on very thick, so much so that Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), with whom he had a famously fraught friendship, remarks that his paintings are more like sculpture. He asks Vincent, 鈥淲hy do you always paint from nature? Why don鈥檛 you just paint what鈥檚 in your mind?鈥� What he doesn鈥檛 recognize is that, for Van Gogh, what is in his mind is what is out there in nature, waiting to be seized. He has to paint furiously because nature 鈥� sanity itself 鈥� is evanescent.聽

I don鈥檛 mean to suggest that the Van Gogh of this movie is some sort of trippy flower child. Dafoe鈥檚 portrayal is a great deal more complicated than that. The greatness of his performance is that we can see, if perhaps Schnabel can鈥檛 entirely, that Vincent is a dreamer, yes, but he is also, in his more lucid moments, a hard-edged realist riven by his demons. 鈥淚 have to paint...,鈥� he tells a sympathetic priest (Mads Mikkelsen). 鈥淚 can鈥檛 do anything else and believe me, I鈥檝e tried.鈥� Vincent is not without his soulmates, foremost his loving brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), an art dealer who supported him because his paintings never sold. But what comes through most formidably in Dafoe鈥檚 acting is Vincent鈥檚 encroaching sense of isolation 鈥� his great and shuddering aloneness. He finds joy in sorrow because he has no choice. 聽

At its best, the film, written by Schnabel, Jean-Claude Carri猫re, and Louise Kugelberg, allows us the heady experience of seeing as Van Gogh sees. He strides into the fields and forests and we try to imagine how he will capture it on canvas. Sometimes Schnabel overdoes the jarring, dissociative visual effects. It鈥檚 the same mistake movie directors often make when filming Shakespeare: You shouldn鈥檛 try to compete with the master. But the effort is understandable and far preferable to the conventional biopic approach.

I have a bit less sympathy for the ways in which the filmmakers shoehorn conjecture and flat-out mythmaking into the narrative. Vincent, it seems, cut off part of his ear as a kind of peace offering to Gauguin, he was shot to death by unruly schoolboys, and so on. Van Gogh鈥檚 life is already plenty mythologized without this dubious extra coating.聽

But the film comes to a great and sorrowing finish when we hear Vincent鈥檚 words, 鈥淚 thought an artist has to teach a way to look at the rest of the world. Not anymore. Now I just think of my relationship with eternity.鈥� One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh鈥檚 words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings. Grade: A- (Rated PG-13 for some thematic content.)