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God, Willem Dafoe really is one of our most undervalued actors. Ignore for a second that he’s about twenty-five years older than Vincent van Gogh when he died and look at his performance here. He’s been this good for so long that it’s easy to forget just how captivating he is in close-up, how great he is in portraying full-bodied agony. If only the rest of At Eternity’s Gate had functioned at his level.
It’s not that At Eternity’s Gate is bad, it’s just that Julian Schnabel’s tendencies as a filmmaking veer towards incoherent visual continuity and a disregard for narrative sense. As van Gogh descends into madness, so too does the camera-work, except Schnabel begins his portrait of the artist at madness and only goes weirder from there. There’s also a distinct lack of purpose in reconciling with the artist as a man or with his work at play here. It’s as if Schnabel merely wanted to film pictorial landscapes and have Dafoe read actual letters from van Gogh describing his wonder at nature’s beauty.
It’s all a bit lazy and ugly with no character’s lasting long enough to get any definition aside from what the talented ensemble brings to them. The entire film is an enigma and a scattershot of ideas, symbols, and faces that hardly register as much of anything after a while. What was the intent of Schnabel’s insouciant camera choices: Are we trying to digest the artist’s near-zealotry to create in the face of omnipresent opposition and criticism? Are we trying to reconcile with art, understanding how it’s critiqued and glimpsed through its time and social prism? Are we aiming for something deeper, richer to be said about van Gogh?
The answer to all of these is yes and no simultaneously as At Eternity’s Gate takes all of them, some more vigorously than others, until it’s carrying too much water for its anemic shoulders to bear. It also becomes something of a gauntlet as scene after scene descends into van Gogh encountering towering, occasionally violent opposition to his technique and belief in his talent. Given that he died in obscurity and was only elevated as a master of the medium through his own invigorating technique, this is not entirely without a core of truth to it. This doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to watch after the third or fourth scene, especially one with school children pelting him with rocks.
This leads us back to Dafoe’s performance, the film’s lifeblood and divinity. It would be too easy to play van Gogh in a showy manner, he was mentally ill after all, but Dafoe forsakes such choices. His eyes simmer with a fully realized inner world, one that the rest of the film elides in favor of painting him as a simple victim of a cruel world. Yet it’s exactly that penetrating gaze that enlivens several tedious scenes, including a few with a wasted Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin. Where Schnabel is blanching away from asking the “why,” Dafoe is valiantly trying to exhume some pathos and sensitivity, to grapple with the madness and creativity of the great artist he’s playing. He makes At Eternity’s Gate worth watching.
