At Eternity's Gate (2018)

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate arrives with the solemn bearing of a museum retrospective and the handheld camera of a nervous documentary. Willem Dafoe, twenty-five years older than the man he plays, wanders the fields outside Arles with his head bowed, painting in a single rapid sitting, muttering about the eternity behind a landscape. The film is a serious work about a serious painter, and it declines nearly every invitation to lecture us about the present. There is no racial commentary, no feminist critique, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance. The cast is European, the subjects are European, and the concerns are those of a nineteenth-century Dutchman arguing with God and with Paul Gauguin. We are asked to watch paint dry, and Schnabel makes that a spiritual exercise.

Where the film does bend history, it bends it thoroughly. The screenplay adopts the Naifeh-Smith theory that van Gogh was shot by two teenage boys playing at cowboys and Indians, not by his own hand. This is a genuine revision of the accepted record, dramatized with conviction and largely rejected by scholars. The result is a film that treats the historical consensus as raw material for an artist's intuition. Van Gogh's mental suffering is rendered with sympathy, though as period madness rather than a modern diagnosis to be affirmed.

The philosophizing is plentiful. A sympathetic priest hears van Gogh out on art and the nature of God, and the painter's voiceover returns often to meaning, nature, and the infinite. Schnabel delivers these musings poetically, without a thesis to defend. There is something restful about a film this indifferent to the cultural weather of its own moment. It has one argument, that painting matters, and it makes that argument with a brush.