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Summary:: at Eternity's Gate Tells The Story of Vincent Van Gogh's Final Years in The South of France Leading

At Eternity's Gate tells the story of Vincent van Gogh's final years leading up to his death, focusing on his time in southern France and mental deterioration. Willem Dafoe's performance as Van Gogh was praised and earned him an Oscar nomination. The film takes an episodic approach to depict Van Gogh's life experiences and struggles with madness as an artist often misunderstood in his time.

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Ariel Aniban Arcamo
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104 views

Summary:: at Eternity's Gate Tells The Story of Vincent Van Gogh's Final Years in The South of France Leading

At Eternity's Gate tells the story of Vincent van Gogh's final years leading up to his death, focusing on his time in southern France and mental deterioration. Willem Dafoe's performance as Van Gogh was praised and earned him an Oscar nomination. The film takes an episodic approach to depict Van Gogh's life experiences and struggles with madness as an artist often misunderstood in his time.

Uploaded by

Ariel Aniban Arcamo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Summary:

At Eternity’s Gate tells the story of Vincent van Gogh’s final years in the south of France leading
up to his death. While based on known details of the artist’s biography, director Julian Schnabel filled in
the details to draw an even richer portrait of the artist’s life. As TIME movie critic Stephanie
Zacharek puts it: “Schnabel riffs on what we know and speculates about much we don’t, imagining what
it was like to see through Van Gogh’s eyes and to live in his skin.”

The film is more “impressionist portrait,” as star Willem Dafoe described it, than straight-up
biopic. In January 2019, Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance. Here’s
what’s true and what’s fiction in At Eternity’s Gate.

Theo van Gogh was an incredibly important figure to his older brother, providing a great deal of
emotional and financial support to Vincent, giving him a weekly envelope of money and acting as his art
dealer. However, the myth that Van Gogh only ever sold one painting in his lifetime isn’t true. While his
art didn’t equip him with the resources to be financially independent, he did sell work here and there
throughout his life. According to the Van Gogh Museum, the exact number of work Van Gogh sold is not
known—but between a paintings, commissions and drawings: “It was more than a couple.”

There remains no consensus as to what illness Van Gogh suffered from, but as depicted in the
film, his mental state greatly deteriorated during his time in Arles. Beginning with the infamous incident
in which he cut off one of his ears, triggered by a row with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh was prone to
periodic breakdowns, during which he would dissociate from reality. At Eternity’s Gate sticks true to the
details regarding his continued hospitalization during the last years of his life.
Like a series of paintings, “At Eternity’s Gate” takes an episodic approach to its subject’s life, focusing on his final
years, often distracted by madness and underappreciated by the world around him. Van Gogh has colleagues like
Paul Gaugin (Oscar Isaac) and his brother Theo (Rupert Friend) around during some of the better days of this final
period of his life, but he often seems to succumb to something greater and unseen, including a self-understanding
that he wasn’t quite made for this world. In one of the film’s best scenes, Van Gogh tells a priest (Mads Mikkelsen)
sent to judge his sanity that he believes perhaps God made him “a painter for people who weren’t born yet.” Did
Van Gogh really have this much of an understanding of how rarely great art is appreciated in the great artist’s
lifetime? Art historians can debate that more accurately than myself, but it’s an underlying theme of Schnabel’s
take on a man too often reduced to the story of his ear. Schnabel paints Vincent Van Gogh as something of an
anomaly in his own time, an outsider to the entire world almost because he could see it differently than anybody
else.
“At Eternity’s Gate” can be a challenging experience for the viewer. Schnabel’s camera is seemingly inches away
from the chins of performers like Isaac and Dafoe, the lines in their faces becoming a sort of art in their own way.
When Schnabel is trying to capture artistic genius or impending madness, he does so without any of the crutches
typically found in a biopic. He’s right there in Dafoe’s face, asking him to not so much become Vincent Van Gogh
but channel the undercurrents that inspired some of the most influential and important art in history. Luckily for
Schnabel, Dafoe is more than up to the challenge. Long one of our best actors, “Gate” is more than just another
notch on his illustrious career. It’s one of his most remarkable performances overall as he finds ways to channel
both the believable, in-the-moment truth of his character and the bigger, philosophical picture his director is trying
to craft. Leagues apart from his Oscar-nominated work in “The Florida Project” last year, this one reminded me
most of his brilliant turn in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” 
While Dafoe’s performance consistently fascinates and elevates the film overall, there were times I wished
Schnabel would catch his breath in terms of the scene after scene of the "deep philosophy of art," and the
filmmaking becomes too self-aware in the second half as Schnabel repeats dialogue and layers images on
themselves in an attempt to replicate madness. Dafoe doesn’t really need those crutches. The best scenes in the
film are the ones in which we see Vincent Van Gogh staring out a landscape or up at an unforgiving sky, asking
questions about why he’s so different and then using that difference to create beautiful art. Those are the
moments when it feels like we are seeing and hearing the voices of all three artists in the film at the same time, the
moments that come closest to capturing the eternal possibilities of art. 

The film focuses closely on the negative responses to Van Gogh’s work, and how the people
surrounding him didn’t understand him. In truth, Van Gogh was far from an outcast in Parisian art
circles, and kept up vigorous correspondence with several of his peers throughout his time in Arles.
Other than Gauguin, Van Gogh was close with Paul Signac and Emile Bernard, among others. He also
received more than one favorable review in his lifetime, and had several works shown at a prestigious
salons in Paris and Brussels.

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