Tortured artists
At Eternity’s Gate
Directed by Julian Schnabel
“Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet,” says Willem Dafoe’s van Gogh. There’s an inescapable dramatic irony to every biopic — we know how the story ends. But this is next level.
The post-Impressionist masterpieces that launched a million greeting cards with well over a billion dollars in sales and stood in for sensitivity on every other student’s wall were originally considered so intense and confronting that he is known to have sold only one painting in his entire lifetime.
Julian Schnabel’s sensual, immersive film shows us a tragedy bigger than simple poverty while contending with the ubiquity of the paintings themselves and our instant familiarity with the sad, short life of Vincent van Gogh. It’s a life that was to become emblematic of that romantic trope, the tortured genius. And there’s even a twist in the tale, apparently — the film adheres to recent research that suggests van Gogh’s mortal gunshot wound
