David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 136 will appear on Friday, Jan. 4. Holiday
cheers!
APPETIZER: Reviews of At
Eternity’s Gate and The Favourite
At Eternity’s Gate
In an oddly spectacular career, Willem Dafoe was film’s
best Jesus (in Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Temptation of Christ), and a startling Satan (in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist). His earnest humanity as
motel manager Bobby, in Sean Baker’s The
Florida Project, was so far from his demonic Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate treats, as the title
suggests, Vincent Van Gogh (Dafoe) as modern art’s most heroic, sacrificial genius. In
an asylum discussion with a worried priest (Mads Mikkelsen), ex-preacher Vincent
offers his rough-hewn gospel of pantheist art: “To me God is nature, and nature
is beauty.” That testament will, for many in our fractious world, suffice.
The story concerns Vincent’s last years, so productive
even as his mind fell apart. Schnabel, a painter whose thick impasto rivals
Vincent’s, piles on his reverence a bit thickly, using some lens distortion to underscore
emotions, but also makes some classy choices (like avoiding the melodrama of
the famous ear-slashing by exploring the pathos of motivation). He doesn’t over-sell
the famous landscapes and sites in Arles, France, where the Dutchman found painterly
heaven and social hell, abandoned even by Paul Gauguin. Schnabel lets the
pictures, and Dafoe’s life-mapped face and sincere voice, deliver the goods. Rather
pointless is the rant of a mad inmate at the St. Remy asylum (for that to work,
we’d need Goya behind the camera).
For me, every artist film echoes the painterly trio of
my late childhood: Vincente Minnelli’s Lust
for Life (with Kirk Douglas’s Vincent, very brave work for a macho star),
John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (José
Ferrer as sardonic Toulouse-Lautrec) and Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth (Alec Guinness amazing as painter-rascal Gulley
Jimson). But Dafoe and Schnabel (Before
Night Falls, Basquiat) do one thing better than those. They provide a
persistent, fascinating sense of Vincent’s work, a driven process of exploration
and redemption (removing old boots, and revealing toe-less socks, he then
paints the boots). Van Gogh, a late bloomer in art, explosively extruded
himself onto canvas. His passionate, vulnerable hunger for truth empowers this
movie, which may have too many words but often has good ones (mostly from
Vincent’s letters).
Valuable are Oscar Isaac as Gauguin (if not with Anthony
Quinn’s fierce virility in Lust for Life)
and Rupert Friend as Vincent’s ever-loving brother, Theo. Dafoe’s open, earthy
visage expresses the angels of Vincent’s artistic mission, and the demons of
his tormented mind. Once more the actor carries a big cross, to another kind of
immortality.
The Favourite
On the IMDB info site, the “Plot Keywords” for The Favourite
are lesbian, lesbian sex, lesbian kiss, female nudity and gay interest. None of
that keeps Yorgos Lanthimos’s lavish history dramedy from seeming rather
pointless. I did feel the pathos of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) loving
her royal rabbits, her compensation for
having lost 17 children. The bunny queen is herself a sad child, a food pig and
a raging ninny, hobbled by gout. The last Stuart monarch (1702-1714) had
Britain’s greatest general, John Churchill, who became the first Duke of
Marlborough after crushing the French, but he is barely seen, like the vapor of
a Marlboro man.
Instead, plenty of big tapestries, bird shooting, ludicrous
dancing, beatings, the pelting of a fat, nude man with oranges, and all those
lesbian yummies. Rachel Weisz is Sarah, bossy royal favorite (oops, favourite) or, in today’s gracious argot, stone-cold power bitch. Her upstart rival is kitchen maid turned Machiavellian sex
kitten Abigail (Emma Stone). Both please Anne in hidden, lustful ways, while men
peacock around under vast wigs of curled hair. The split music score (18th
century palace baroque, plus modern “ironic” percussion) is matched by dialog like
“Anyway, think on it. No pressure” (first part dimly Old England, second part
definitely not). Fisheye lenses puff the big rooms and gaudy, ponderous rituals.
Far too lacking is the jolly fun of Tom
Jones (1963), although Tom’s fun hardly deserved four Oscars.
SALAD (A List)
Remarkable
Films About Famous Painters
In order of arrival, with their star:
In order of arrival, with their star:
Rembrandt (1936, Charles Laughton as Rembrandt van Rijn), Moulin Rouge (1953, José Ferrer as Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec), La Mystere Picasso
(1956, Pablo Picasso as himself), Lust
for Life (1956, Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh), Andrei Rublev (1966, Anatoli Solonitsyn as Rublev), Edvard Munch (1974, Geir Westby as
Munch), Oviri: Wolf at the Door (1986,
Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin), Vincent
& Theo (1990, Tim Roth as Vincent van Gogh), Basquiat (1996, Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat), Goya in Bordeaux (1999, Francisco Rabal
as Francisco Goya), Pollock (2000, Ed
Harris as Jackson Pollock), Frida
(2002, Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo), Mr.
Turner (2014, Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
A
pretty fair painter himself, Orson Welles put art at the center of his
late-career essay film F for Fake, a
witty doodle-fest about magic, fraud, art mania and impish master forger Elmyr
de Hory. “Every true artist,” Welles remarked, “must, in his own way, be a
magician, a charlatan. Picasso once said he could paint fake Picassos as well
as anybody, and someone like Picasso could say something like that and gets
away with it. But an Elymr de Hory? Elmyr is a profound embarrassment to the
art world, a man of talent making monkeys out of those who have disappointed
him (by never liking his ‘original’ art).” (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Writer
Ian Christie called Alec Guinness’s painter Gulley Jimson ‘one of the few
authentic artist characters in British or any other cinema’ … The scamp Jimson
is soul-fraternal with Van Gogh, who confided to his brother Theo, ‘Who am I in
the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person,’
but then added with Jimsonian fortitude that ‘through my work I’d like to show
what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody.” (From the Alec
Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of
my book Starlight Rising, available via
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
As
shadows loom, Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) paints his last landscape in Lust for Life (MGM, 1956; director
Vincente Minnelli, photography by Russell Harlan, Freddie Young).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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