BEFORE: This is the first of two films this month that is not horror-based or Halloween-related in any way - it's really only here because it allows me to link the other horror-based films together. In any other year, I'd just note an indirect link and move on, but since I have a perfect chain reaching all the way back to January, it seems like it would be a shame to spoil that now, and so I'm allowing myself a little connective tissue. (The second film at the end of the month isn't really a crucial link, but it's a film with only one name actor that just won't fit anywhere else, other than between two films with that same actor.)
Yes, I've compromised the horror chain just a bit to allow in two unrelated films - but if you think about it, I watched "A Quiet Place" and "Alien: Covenant" back in the spring, and those feel like they probably SHOULD belong in October - so with two horror films outside October and two non-horror films inside, at least there's a sense of balance. And it would have been FOUR non-horror films in October, if I hadn't re-structured my chain earlier this week and made some last-minute substitutions - so I now feel like I'm doing the best I can to stay on-theme while still maintaining the chain - and tomorrow I'll link back up to this month's main theme.
Saoirse Ronan carries over from "The Host".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "At Eternity's Gate" (Movie #3,172)
THE PLOT: A young man comes to the last hometown of painter Vincent van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist's final letter and ends up investigating his final days there.
AFTER: If I stretch the parameters just a bit, I can still make a case that I'm on theme here. A loose secondary theme for this week has been "madness and mental disorders", I think. The kid in "Coco" had a delusion that he somehow traveled to the afterlife without dying, and his family was under the delusion that the spirits of their dead relatives come and visit them once a year, if they put up their photos. Count Dracula in "Hotel Transylvania 3" had his "Zing effect" that made him go crazy in love, and before that he was an over-protective parent who didn't like to leave his hotel (agoraphobia?). Then of course "The Predator" dealt with Asperger's, PTSD and Tourette's in one giant buffet of mental disorders. And last night we had a human and an alien sharing space in the same brain and body, which seemed like a new form of split personality.
(EDIT: I swear this is true, it's Mental Illness Awareness Week, a fact I learned about just now, after the fact. Some force greater than me may be at work here when it comes to my programming coincidences...)
Which means that Vincent van Gogh fits in perfectly this week - while he was technically never diagnosed with a mental disorder, he did check himself into an asylum for a while, and he did cut off his own ear (though there's debate over exactly WHY he did that) and then of course there's the belief that he committed suicide. Anti-social, alcoholic, deeply troubled - it's the technical definition of a troubled artist. (Hmm, this is easier than I thought - I figured I'd have to fall back on the suggestion of wearing a bloody bandage over your ear and dressing as Van Gogh for a Halloween costume...) As I saw earlier this year in that film starring Willem Dafoe, living in the French countryside and making hundreds of paintings in a few months was his form of therapy, his way of dealing with the world. He had a poor diet, drank and smoked too much, just generally couldn't take care of himself as an adult should, but man, he made some amazing paintings while he was circling the drain.
Regarding the story here, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that van Gogh's life is mostly seen in flashback, as the son of a postman tries to track down Vincent's brother, Theo, to deliver a letter addressed to Vincent. So usually that's a bad storytelling technique in my mind, because it's based around people talking and relating stories, and that breaks the rule of "Show, don't tell" and also tends to slip into one of those non-linear messes that are all the rage these days. But the good news is that "Loving Vincent" also seems to follow the format of another film that followed this formula, as a man interviewed a bunch of people trying to piece together what happened in the last year of a very famous man's life. Of course, I'm talking about "Citizen Kane", which if you think about it, was probably the very first mockumentary, since its lead character was technically fictional, albeit a thinly-veiled version of William Randolph Hearst.
The advantage here is that van Gogh (here pronounced like "van Gock", which may be more correct but also seem) was real - only, how much do we really know about those last few years, where he was so isolated and mainly kept to himself, either intentionally or because his personality and poor hygiene kept everyone else away. Did he cut off his ear to impress a woman, or to express his friendship with (or attraction to) Paul Gauguin, or was this the result of a mental breakdown. Or maybe was it just a bad shaving accident with his straight razor? About the only thing we can all agree on is that people with mental illness shouldn't be around razors. The man didn't even bathe properly, why should he be trusted with a full shaving kit? That seems like it was an accident waiting to happen...
Then we come to the shooting incident - was it suicide, murder, or neither? We may never know, so unfortunately the movie can't seem to answer the question either. As Armand Roulin asks more people about the incident, he goes through all of the possibilities - first suicide, which is a natural conclusion for the tortured artist mentality, but then another person points out that the angle of the bullet's entry is all wrong for the wound to have been self-inflicted, plus people who commit suicide tend to shoot themselves in the head, not the stomach. Toss in his contentious relationship with Doctor Gachet, the fact that the doctor would not even try to remove the bullet, and how quickly the good doctor took some of van Gogh's paintings as payment for his services, and there's a pretty good case for murder (means, motive and opportunity).
But there is a third possibility, which was also raised by the film "At Eternity's Gate" - the theory that the gun was fired by one of a group of young boys who liked to pretend to be cowboys, and somehow got a hold of a real gun. In this scenario, Van Gogh claims to not know who shot him but would have been protecting the shooter's identity, for fear that the boy would be severely punished. Also under this scenario, he might refuse medical treatment because down deep he was dissatisfied with life and wanted to die, though he believed that suicide was a terrible sin, so he may have seen this as his ticket out. It's an interesting theory that ticks all the boxes, but that doesn't mean that it's the truth.
This theory is a little too tidy, perhaps - it neatly dodges the issue of whether van Gogh's death was a murder or a suicide, as nobody is responsible for an accident in the end, and it also makes him seem like a decent, well-intentioned person for not turning in the kid who shot the gun. There's a part of all of us that wants to believe that because he was a great artist, he was therefore also a great human - but it's not necessarily so, those are two separate things. What we've learned as a society over the last few years is that being a celebrity and being a decent human don't always go hand-in-hand. Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Matt Lauer - do I need to go on? Famous celebrities, but as we learned more about their personal bad habits, garbage humans. Now, if we take the modern lessons and apply them back to van Gogh, it's easier to separate out his artistic talent and the fame that it brought to him (after death, unfortunately) from his personal habits and his inability to socialize or work well with others. Whatever mental issues he had were just the frosting on a very messed-up cake.
To me, the most fascinating thing about the film is that it's animated in a style that mimics van Gogh's art style throughout. All of the buildings in Auvers and even the people resemble moving versions of his paintings. That's an incredible amount of work (about 65,000 oil paintings), even if you factor in the rotoscoping of the actors (some animators consider rotoscoping a form of cheating) and the casting of (mostly) the same actors in the voice cast to dress and look like 19th-century French people. So essentially they acted out all the dialogue scenes live, and then blended that footage in with the background paintings - even with the time-saving cheats, it still seems like an enormous amount of artistic work, making a 90-minute film in the style of his impressionist art. Color me impressed, though at least one of my bosses didn't find it as fascinating.
However, the story may be in the style of "Citizen Kane", but without any "Rosebud"-type of revelation. I found it just as hard to crack the code on Vincent's mind-set here as the young man asking people about their memories of him one year after he died.
Also starring Robert Gulaczyk, Douglas Booth (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Jerome Flynn, Helen McCrory (last seen in "The Count of Monte Cristo"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Molly's Game"), John Sessions (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Eleanor Tomlinson (last seen in "Jack the Giant Slayer"), Aidan Turner ("The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Cezary Lukaszewicz, Josh Burdett, Holly Earl (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Robin Hodges, Martin Herdman and the voice of Jochum ten Haaf (last seen in "Dunkirk").
RATING: 6 out of 10 wheat fields
No comments:
Post a Comment