Technicolor Vincent

Why filmmakers love van Gogh.

- Anthony Lane

A man walks into a field. The day is young. He starts to run, then stops and lies down on his back. He gathers handfuls of soil and sprinkles it over his face. Earth falls onto his eyes. Some goes into his mouth. Anyone passing by would think he was trying to bury himself. But he sits up, wipes his face, laughs, licks his dirty lips, and gets to work.

The scene comes from “At Eternity’s Gate,” a new film directed by Julian Schnabel, and the man is Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe. That toothy grin is unmistakable, as is the deep, confiding tone with which Dafoe recites the words of van Gogh, in voiceover. The actor is sixty-three, whereas the painter was thirty-seven when he died—of a gunshot wound, in 1890— but you barely notice the gap between them. Dafoe’s intensity is undimmed (he seems not to have aged since his jungly exertions in “Platoon,” more than thirty years ago), and, as for van Gogh, he was worn and torn by the strain of being alive. “I have a portrait of myself, all ash-colored,” he wrote to Paul Gauguin, in 1888, and the ash figure he refers to, with sucked-in cheeks and hair cropped close to the skull, resembles a prisoner with no hope of parole. The backdrop is malachite green, quivering and sick. The question, as we confront such an image, is not how old van Gogh is but how much time he has left—how much longer he can survive on what he calls “the élan of my bony carcass.”