Van Gogh at the Movies: Loving Vincent vs At Eternity’s Gate

I’ve finally gotten around to watching last year’s “At Eternity’s Gate”, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe in an Academy Award nominated role as Vincent Van Gogh. While it is a biographical film, it doesn’t follow the structure and conventions of your average Hollywood biopic, something that’s really refreshing. While watching the film I couldn’t help but compare it to another recent van Gogh biopic (for obvious reasons), 2017’s animated feature “Loving Vincent”, which gained prominensce through its reputation of being the first 100% fully oil painted feature film. I am no van Gogh expert, I only know about the man the little information I learned back in school and what both these films have told me (you may add the “Crows” segment in Kurosawa’s “Dreams”, were the artist was played by Martin Scorsese), yet today I wanna do something that I don’t usually do on this blog: a direct comparison between both pictures. Like I said, I’m no expert on the subject matter, so I won’t be basing my comparison on historical facts, but rather on how both films approach its topic and how they go about telling its story.

Both films recount the final period of Van Gogh’s life, yet each has its particular way to tackle the subject: “Loving Vincent” tells the story from the point of view of Armand Roulin, son of postman Joseph Roulin (who was inmortalized by Vincent himself through the famous Portrait of Postman Joseph Roulin), as he delivers the last letter ever written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo. After coming to the conclusion that the events surrounding his suicide are suspicious, Armand travels to Auvers-sur-Oise and meets several people who were in contact with Vincent in order to clear his questions about the painter’s death. On the other hand we have “At Eternity’s Gate”, a film that assumes Van Gogh’s first person perspective and recounts the last couple of years of the painter’s life, but more than just putting forward a retelling of the events in question, the film goes out of its way to actually understand and recreate Van Gogh’s inner world and personal turmoil. 

Let’s talk about “Loving Vincent” for a while now. The project was helmed by Dorota Kobiela, herself a painter and Hugh Welchman, an Academy Award winning filmmaker of short films up until this point. There’s no denying that this picture is a huge technical achievement. The film takes Van Gogh’s style and brings it to life through a combination of “traditional” animation (in the sense that its hand drawn, yet it is actually not done by animators but by oil painters who know the craft of the man in question), and rotoscope, by which actors get to perform through motion capture. This is no easy feat and such technical mastery shouldn’t be overlooked. Nevertheless, on the storytelling front the film is to be found lacking. It is interesting how they pose Vincent Van Gogh as this mysterious figure that no one really understood, yet the film’s narrative is completely held by this mystery and the one surrounding his death. This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but this is problematic when that’s the only interesting aspect of your movie. See, Van Gogh is ultimately reduced to a simple plot device, even when it is his story the one that’s being told. The main character, played by Douglas Booth, is ultimately plain and boring and isn’t engaging at all (one might argue that he doesn’t have to be, since its Vincent’s story, but Armand lies at the centre of the picture, they should try to make him interesting at least). Then there’s all the supporting characters, more than a couple of which are more interesting than Armand, and that surely is a sign of trouble. You’ve got all these scenes with these different characters as they start to remember and tell about their anecdotes with Vincent, a clever way of framing the film’s story, but each time the technique feels less as an adequate framing device and more like a gimmick. Ultimately, the film is focused way more on retelling the events of Van Gogh’s last few months than truly make an attempt in understanding the man. There’s one line, spoken by Marguerite Gachet played by Saoirse Ronan, that somewhat tragically diagnoses the film’s own flaws: “You want to know so much about his death. What do you know of his life?”

In contrast you have Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate”. On the technical level, beyond some experimental camera work, there isn’t much that can be called revolutionary, unlike “Loving Vincent”‘s animation approach. It is live-action and it decides to tell its story chronologically, and yet it feels much more like an art film than one that employs non-linear storytelling and experimental animation. The reason to this is quite simple, yet it makes all the difference: “At Eternity’s Gate” is character driven, whereas “Loving Vincent” is plot driven. Schnabel’s film assumes Van Gogh’s first person perspective and runs away with it. Willem Dafoe’s performance has to be mentioned, because this is one of those films that lives and dies with its main actor’s role. While the fact that Dafoe, aged 63, plays a man who only lived until age 37 can be a little distracting at times, the man truly embodies the existential anguish that the legendary painter experienced. Schnabel builds his film around this and the results are incredible. There are long sequences of Van Gogh painting, of him just laying in the grass and feeling the moment, of him having prolongued discussions on art with Paul Gauguin (played by Oscar Isaacs), and yet it is so captivating and enthralling, it is precisely in those moments where “nothing significant” happens where the film’s beauty lies. Whereas “Loving Vincent” goes from plot beat to plot beat, “At Eternity’s Gate” really takes its time to capture the man’s inner world and, perhaps even more importantly, inner turmoil. There are a few scenes where Van Gogh is on the peak of his insanity, the camera assumes its point of view and the colour grading is yellowish and extremely saturated, something that may pass for a stylistic choice for that particular scene, yet when the camera shifts to another character’s perspective we see the world through a more normal lense. It might not be something big, but it is one example of how the film effectively approaches its subject matter that goes beyond a straight forward retelling of the man’s life events.

Now, this piece may give the impression that I didn’t like “Loving Vincent”. I just wanna go out and say that that is definitely not the case: I really enjoyed the film for what it is, found the animation style to be completely breathtaking, and while I didn’t find the story nor the main characters to be that interesting as they could’ve been, I was actually entertained til the end. The thing is, the film isn’t as great as it should have been, I wasn’t even too compelled to write about it until I saw “At Eternity’s Gate”, which is by far the superior film. I once said on my review on The Color of Pomegranates that a biopic shouldn’t just be a retelling of the subject’s life, but instead it should try and recreate the person in question’s reality. Perhaps it is curious that the film that achieved this wasn’t the one that visually recreates Van Gogh’s paintings, instead it was the live-action one that tells its story in chronological order. Like I said, I’m no expert on the legendary artist’s life and work, so I can’t tell you which one is the more accurate. I can only tell you which one was the one I liked the most, and for the reasons exposed in this piece it was definitely “At Eternity’s Gate”.

Thanks for reading and I hope you liked it. I haven’t written that much lately because I’ve been travelling around my homeland, but I’ll soon be back in Germany to continue my studies and I can get back to my more regular posting. This was post number 100 of Breaking the Fourth Wall, and I can just say thank you to everyone that has been reading up until now and let’s hope there’s even more to come! Anyway, if you could leave a like and share this with friends, family or anyone who might be interested it would be really appreciated, and if you want to stay up to date with the contents of this blog don’t forget to hit that follow button. Until next time!