At Eternity's Gate

The word "artsy" has a whiff of arrogance to it, an implication that the thing to which the adjective is being applied holds itself in higher regard than it should. That the thing has a sense of wanting to be Meaningful Art (if such a thing exists in objective reality) but comes up short due to a presumption of importance. But if the concept of artsy exists, there must be something else at the other of the spectrum. A state wherein media is made with a deliberate attempt at being "art", but without the ego. A willful embrace of beauty, not for the sake of anything but giving that beauty a new pot in which to flower. Call it "artful". That seems to be the unstated mission of At Eternity's Gate, a biopic about the last years of the life of Vincent Van Gogh as he struggles with his mental health and his turbulent friendship with Paul Gauguin. Gate could easily backslide into the many traps of biopics: naval-gazing hero worship, exaggerating simple events into soap opera-esque melodrama, or becoming a grotesque, exploitative autopsy. Gate does none of these. It just follows his life, his inspirations, his challenges, his approach to his painting, and his struggles with depression. It does not attempt to diagnose him, it does not romanticize his famous self-mutilation as time has done on its own, and it does not turn him into a folk hero. Van Gogh is just a man here, with emotional peaks and valley the same as anybody else. The artfulness of the movie comes in the framing of Van Gogh and the world around him. There is a lot of silence in Gate, a lot of takes looking at him, or watching him walk, or other similarly mundane things. Gate shows Van Gogh's turbulence -- you can't hide that, it's a fundamental part of his life -- but it never lingers on that with morbid fascination. It is presented as matter-of-factly as him hiking to a field to capture a landscape. Gate seems to want the viewer to understand the man through not his art, but the process in which his art was born, and manifests that by crafting a film around him that embraces the little inspirations that touched him so; the way the morning light hits a sunflower, or the authenticity in a peasant woman's dirt-covered face on the road. Often the movie goes into first-person, literally putting the viewer in Van Gogh's eyes as he regards the world. It is hard to put into words. Simply calling the movie "beautifully shot" or "exquisitely framed" is not enough. The movie loves the process of art but does not sanctify it, and that comes through in how the film plays out. It's something one has to see for themselves to understand. That said, this artful process comes with a price, and that is that Gate is a rather slow movie. I did not expect this to make Van Gogh a raving lunatic, and I'm glad it didn't, but the cost of doing business this way is a movie that doesn't have a strong narrative thread or any sense of urgency. Gate struggles to be a Sunday stroll through a park. That slowness can make the movie almost feel inert. I appreciate the beauty, but I also found myself looking at my phone a few times. Not out of boredom, but out of a need to break myself away from the hypnotically slow pacing. As time wore on, I began to appreciate Gate more than I enjoyed it. Willem Dafoe's performance is masterful, and even though this isn't a feast for the eyes in a Cecil B. Demille kind of way, there's an undeniable beauty to the movie's visual language. It's a movie that wants to take its time, to let the little moments land with all the impact they possibly can, and I applaud it for that. But other edge of the sword is that Gate is a movie content to float along and let the waves take it wherever. It is the lazy river of movies, and that's going to have limited appeal.