I watched the Vincent van Gogh movie, At Eternity’s Gate, with Willem Dafoe on Netflix yesterday. It was excellent and I highly recommend it. Willem Dafoe was perfect for the role of Van Gogh, or maybe there are many ways of playing him, but he really captured his personality in the sense that van Gogh was a person who was very thoughtful, very passionate and wore his heart on his sleeve. The actor who plays Gauguin also captures Gauguin's personality very well, or how I would expect his personality to be based on what I know about him; bold, brash and confident.The details were very carefully presented, the yellow room, the dress of the time, the bars, right down to Van Gogh's dirty fingernails.
Why another Van Gogh movie? I had read the Lust for Life when I was in high school and it made a strong impression on me, and I have read about Van Gogh since then, so I knew a lot about van Gogh's life already. Which is why I wasn’t that excited to see the movie, thinking I already knew the story. But this movie doesn’t do a broad history of his life, instead it focuses in on key moments that represent him at a very existential level. As my art history teacher at the University of Utah, Bob Olpin, pointed out, Vincent van Gogh's life story was the origin of the cliché of the suffering Artist. Probably true, But suffering artist is not my take away from Van Gogh as a person. My take away from Van Gogh was that he was passionate about life, and he put all his experience and his whole self into his art passionately. Tuning into our passion, and putting our whole selves into our art, is something that all of us artists can aspire towards. It’s an accessible thing, and Van Gogh showed us this very well. And At Eternity's Gate shows us this aspect of Van Gogh very well. Definitely a movie worth seeing!