At Eternity’s Gate
- Title: At Eternity’s Gate
- IMDb: link
The latest from director Julian Schnabel takes us on a journey with Vincent van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) during the painter’s final years. Shot in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône and Auvers-sur-Oise, France, where van Gogh lived during his final years, the film offers beautiful shots of the French countryside, countless close-ups of Dafoe’s face and paintings, and a somewhat unfocused narrative on the artist’s eccentric nature, loneliness, and view of the world.
The strength of Schnabel’s film is the look and style and its more silent moments centered around van Gogh where some of the magic of the artistic’s work is shown, but when the film moves from this to longer dialogues, often oddly filmed in extreme closeups, in attempts to explain van Gogh, the sequences are more hit-and-miss. Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin and Rupert Friend as Vincent’s brother lead a supporting cast of those moving in and out of the artist’s troubled life. Their scenes with Dafoe, and those involving a schoolteacher and unruly students, turn out to be the best of the sequences featuring Vincent interacting with others. But at its best, At Eternity’s Gate focuses on van Gogh’s interaction with nature and art, which to him were much the same thing.
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