Van Gogh biopic fades to grey. The visual vibrancy of Julian Schnabel’s rendering of the painter’s last years isn’t matched by his handling of the story (The Guardian).
Boring: redundant and obsessive focus on Van Gogh’s insanity, visions, obsessions and nightmares. I don’t think it makes the great visionary painter justice, his genius and mal du vivre, strictly interlinked, are obscured by the lunacy of the character in the film. Chapeau to Dafoe, but that’s not enough to make a meaningful lasting movie.
The film runs smoothly, historically very accurate, the class clash very neatly pointed out without becoming a pamphlet. The climactic scene of the massacre is cinematographically perfect, a mise en scène of a kind of event we would see many times in the next century, the police and the army as weapons of mass repression. Long live that revolt in our memory!