The troubled artist and the work he or she produces, or attempts to produce, are favorite themes of motion pictures devoted to their lives and loves, and to the sacrifices they've made for their art.
Those who are not blessed with the God-given talent for creating art are frequently puzzled as to what drives these artists to dig so deep down into their souls that they damage their physical health - or what little of it they had to begin with. Hand in hand with these ailments, their mental faculties are oftentimes disturbed, much to their detriment and to irreversible effect.
When these ailments are transferred to the silver screen, viewers can't help but feel as though they are voyeurs partaking of these cinematic re-enactments. This brings us to the next batch of features about the artistic life and its consequences.
Lust for Life (1956)One of the prime examples of the artist who suffered, deliberately and repeatedly, in order to produce great art (or any art, for that matter) involves the Post-Impressionist Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (pronounced "Hawh" in the original Dutch, with an emphasis on the guttural, hard "H" sound).
We are all familiar with van Gogh and the stories of his obsessive-compulsive behavior and explosive temper. The well-told tale of how, unable to sell his work or make a living from his paintings, the harried Vincent ended up committing suicide after countless bouts of depression, psychosis, lead poisoning, alcohol, and such. How he sliced off an earlobe after arguing with the equally intractable Paul Gauguin. And how, after his death, his works were eventually "discovered" and made famous the world over.
From such a story, more stories arose and took hold of the reader-listener. One of them, writer Irving Stone's 1934 biographic book Lust for Life, formed the basis for a motion picture of the same name. MGM's widescreen Metrocolor® production of Lust for Life (1956) featured a talented lineup headed by the scorching Kirk Douglas as van Gogh, Anthony Quinn as fellow firebrand Paul Gauguin, James Donald as Vincent's art dealer brother Theo, Henry Daniell as their rigid father Theodorus van Gogh, Everett Sloane as Dr. Gachet, Noel Purcell as Anton Mauve, and Pamela Brown as Christine, with Niall MacGinnis, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, and Laurence Naismith in other roles.
Stylishly directed by Vincente Minnelli, with a jarringly powerful film score by Miklós Rózsa, the movie follows a familiar trajectory of events leading up to Vincent's premature passing. (Stone also authored the 1961 historical novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, about the High-Renaissance sculptor and artist Michelangelo's struggles with Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the subject of our previous post.) The outstanding cinematography was provided by Russell Harlan and Freddie Young, with superb recreations of many of van Gogh's magnificent portraits, still-lives, and landscapes.
The screenplay, by former radio broadcaster and writer Norman Corwin, emphasized van Gogh's growing mental instability and mounting frustrations with his lot in life, sometimes in straight dramatic displays, other times coupled with over-the-top histrionics. Take, for instance, the notorious "hand-over-the-lit-candle" incident, a legendary trope among movie buffs that has been savagely mocked ever since its initial introduction (especially by impressionist Frank Gorshin, who perfected Douglas' clenched-jaw, gritting-of-teeth acting style).
Starting out as an itinerant minister, the film portrays van Gogh as an abject "failure" in this regard, but as an individual with a social conscience and an immense capacity for work and personal sacrifice. He was also an extremely lonely, boorish human being. Rejected outright by one of his female cousins, van Gogh runs off to Gay Paree (at his brother Theo's suggestion) where he takes up painting. By the way, his art-dealer sibling, as compassionate and accommodating a soul as one would ever hope for, provides Vincent with monetary assistance whenever possible.
Unfortunately, van Gogh is rejected as well by the academic art world for his undisciplined working methods, primitive painting skills, and skewed proportions (ironically, the very things he would be most known for). Vincent's dependency on his brother only aggravates an already explosive situation.
Consequently, both Vincent and his newfound friend, the self-absorbed, bullying painter Gauguin, retreat to Arles in the south of France (again, the idea was Theo's) where, for a time, they bolster each other's work (and ego). Soon, Gauguin realizes that Vincent is unstable, while the impatient, restless van Gogh - as much of a control freak as he is an obsessive-compulsive - nags Gauguin to drink. The two men argue incessantly, which ends badly for van Gogh. The scene of the slicing off of Vincent's ear, shot off-camera but within an excruciatingly descriptive sound design (bolstered by Rózsa's sharp-edged music), is memorable more for the self-loathing it suggests rather than what is actually shown of the self-mutilation.
The performances throughout are commendable, however, with Kirk taking the acting (or, rather, OVER-acting) honors, although Quinn as Gauguin copped a Best Supporting Actor Award at the Oscars. Still, this is Douglas' show all the way. The fact that he spoke fluent French (the film was shot on location, as depicted in the copious exteriors) and bore an impressive likeness to the real van Gogh (with red beard and straw hat intact) only added to its so-called "authenticity." Douglas played on the audience's sympathy, which works for a time but can get downright cloying when he (in character) constantly grasps his head and runs his hands through his cropped hair for the hundredth time. Sadly, this is what 1950s Hollywood took for its depiction of mental illness.
Not quite as authentic as well was Scotsman James Donald as Theo. Donald is a tad too rigid and refined, with a typical Anglican reserve to his bearing that was not out of place in such later military fare as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Great Escape (1963). But here, one longed for him to open up the floodgates, to show some fire and spirit. Historically, under the upstanding, above-board exterior Theo was just as volatile and driven as his older brother. This is hardly explored at all; what we get instead is sympathy, sympathy, and, oh, yes, more sympathy.
Vincent's controversial suicide and bedside death are also shown, albeit to suit the dramatic purposes of the story. (And there is no mention of Theo's own passing six months later from dementia and paralysis, an inexcusable oversight.) Modern research has shown, however, that Vincent may not have taken his own life after all, as previously thought, but could have been shot quite by accident by some mischievous teenagers in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise where he lived and worked.
Besides the aforementioned gorgeous photography, the best thing about Lust for Life is Douglas' uncanny, spot-on portrait of the artist, the quintessential case study of bipolar affliction.
The Moon and Sixpence (1946)We move on from Vincent's emotional foibles to a movie about Paul - Paul Gauguin, that is, the Parisian-born Post-Impressionist and purveyor of primitivism. Did you know that Gauguin's life was dramatized long before van Gogh's (in a highly romanticized manner, of course) and by another actor? Yes, the Russian-born British citizen George Sanders portrayed Monsieur Gauguin - or rather, an artificial version of the same.
The film was entitled The Moon and Sixpence (1946). Released independently by United Artists and directed by Albert Lewin ( The Picture of Dorian Gray), the movie was based on a novel by William Somerset Maugham, first published in 1919. Both the novel and the movie are fictionalized accounts of the author's friendship and acquaintance with the reclusive, egomaniacal yet world-renowned artist, painter, and sculptor Gauguin.
In this black-and-white feature (the restored print has some amber-tinted Tahitian scenes, along with a brilliantly lit Technicolor finale), Gauguin is renamed Charles Strickland, a bored London stockbroker who longs to leave the dull confines of British domesticity and bourgeois respectability in order to paint his innermost desires. Sanders gave the artist in question a cautiously hulking, brooding quality. He also dies of leprosy, another fictional slant to the story (by way of punishment for his sins?). The real Gauguin was suspected of having (and spreading) syphilis. As Strickland nears his own end, he orders the natives to burn his final masterpiece, so that little to nothing of his life's work is left behind. What was all that about suffering for one's art?
The real-life Gauguin was a staid, middle-class financier (if at a lower hierarchic level) who, when the bottom fell out of the market of his life, turned to painting as a full-time livelihood. He left his solidly middle-class wife and family to eventually make his way to Paris, then to Martinique and eventually to faraway French Polynesia, where he doted on the local flora and fauna, to include the lovely young Tahitian lasses who figured so prominently in his work.
In the movie, the author Somerset Maugham is called Geoffrey Wolfe and was portrayed by London native Herbert Marshall, who appeared in the same role, and in the same year (but under the author's real name), in a Tyrone Power-Anne Baxter vehicle for Twentieth Century-Fox called The Razor's Edge - a later Somerset Maugham narrative about a soul- searching angry young man looking for meaning in his life, and in the lives of his filthy rich society friends.
Vincent & Theo (1990)Directed by the independent-minded auteur Robert Altman ( M*A*S*H*, Nashville, The Player), this two-hour feature starred the versatile Tim Roth as van Gogh and Paul Rhys as his brother Theo.
It's basically a Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau re-evaluation of Vincent and Theo's perpetually intertwined relationship to each other, documented (or not) in those hundreds upon hundreds of letters they wrote. Many, if not most, of Theo's correspondence to Vincent were destroyed by Vincent himself. Although art historians and the public in general have access only to Vincent's side of the exchange, one can still get a more than complete picture of their association via the circumstances in which the brothers addressed their thoughts and related to one another.
In a word, they were inseparable. Director Altman, in a making-of mini-documentary, mentions that they were very much like the Corsican Brothers, i.e. if one got sick, the other threw up. When Vincent died, Theo died, too. They shared a commonality of interest in art, due to two uncles who worked in the art field. Consequently, Theo became an art dealer and, as noted in many accounts, introduced his brother to the leading art figures of the day, among them Cézanne, Rousseau, Pissaro, Seurat, and, of course, Gauguin.
Equal time is given to both brothers' predicaments and to the respective, symbiotic parts they played in one another's lives. The closeness, fierceness, mutual admiration, rivalry, and out-and-out disgust they displayed are more fully explored in Altman's film than in Minnelli's standard Hollywood biopic.
Vincent's coarseness and slovenliness are emphasized as well, sometimes for contrast against the clean-shaven and dignified Theo's appearance, but more often to place the artist within the context of his art (which, we are told pictorially, served as a projection of his inner torment). Vincent lived as he wanted, and his dirty, disheveled, dissipated lifestyle, stained clothing and teeth, abrasive behavior, and poverty-stricken habitation became the manifestation of what viewers generally suspected an unappreciated artist's life to be.
Credit for this outstanding personification goes to Tim Roth, who literally becomes the suffering artist Vincent. There's nothing likable about this individual at all. We see Roth eat his paints; he even drinks the turpentine he uses to thin out those paints - heck, right out of the canister, mind you! If obsession is the key to this character's turmoil, then Roth has earned his keep. This is as close to the way the real van Gogh may have behaved as one is likely to get - maybe too close for the audience's comfort.
In contrast, Paul Rhys as Theo is the exact opposite of his brother. Tall, slim, and oh-so-proper and prim, Rhys wears his respectability on his sleeve. He also loves his older brother to death with an unending verve and passion, and will do anything to help him. Theo tries, mostly in vain, to find a buyer for Vincent's work, yet Vincent accuses him (rather unfairly) of not doing enough to aid him in that respect. Is Theo his brother's keeper? No matter how much Theo tries to prop his brother up and get him to stand on his own two feet, Vincent plops back down to wallow in self-pity and self-hate.
Neither brother comes off well in this showcase. After two hours of this (the feature was originally intended as a four-hour-long miniseries for television), viewers are ready to throw up their hands and yell, "Enough, already! We get it, we get it! Artists suffer for their art!"
In sharp contrast to the above, the mincing portrait we get of Gauguin (French-Bulgarian actor Wladimir Yordanoff) is an unfortunate misstep. Unlike the lustful, violent, boastful, larger-than-life Anthony Quinn figure, here, Gauguin is played as more of a wimp, as personality-less putty in Vincent's manipulative hands and utterly lacking in energy and vibrancy. No "lust for life" in this guy? Hmm.... I guess not.
The score by Gabriel Yared is another huge letdown. While it's true that Rózsa's very film-noir influenced themes tend to spotlight the painter's intensity a bit too obviously, they do serve the underlying emotional purposes quite appropriately. Yared's music, however, goes nowhere. It fails to do what film scores were intended to do: which is, to sonically add to the general understanding of a picture's aims. Something by Erik Satie, or Claude Debussy, would have been a better way to capture the moodiness and melancholy of the era, as well as the essence of van Gogh's fabulous output.
In general, Altman's Vincent & Theo is a warts-and-all (and then some) study of two brothers - a much closer real-life assessment of their star-crossed lives - while Minnelli's Lust for Life is your standard Fifties grin-and-bear-it struggle for fame and fortune, a one-sided essay on one artist's failure to make good.
End of Part Two
(To be continued.....)
Copyright © 2018 by Josmar F. Lopes
