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Starry nights
The MFA offers up its Vincent collection
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

No surprise that when it comes to films about artists, Vincent van Gogh leads the pack. His works sell for millions, they look fabulous on screen, and his life — neglected by the public, mystery illness, cutting off his ear in Arles, committing suicide in Auvers — is the stuff of directors’ dreams. You might expect there’d be more major Van Gogh films than the quintet the Museum of Fine Arts will show over the next month, but as far as I know the MFA has gathered the lot. Hollywood is represented by Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 Lust for Life. The documentary is Paul Cox’s 1987 Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh. The auteur version is Robert Altman’s 1990 Vincent & Theo. Giving us the French view of things is Maurice Pialat with his 1991 Van Gogh. There’s even a children’s film, Michael Rubbo’s 1990 Vincent et moi.

What is surprising is how well Lust for Life (May 24 at 5:40 p.m. and May 26 at 11 a.m.) holds up. Sure, it’s a Tinseltown star vehicle, and Kirk Douglas is Vincent as Hollywood hero; you can hear echoes of Charlton Heston’s Moses and his own Doc Holliday (from John Ford’s My Darling Clementine). But at least the self-righteous religious note is there — in a lot of ways, Vincent actually was like Hollywood’s Moses. Anthony Quinn prefigures his Zorba thing as Paul Gauguin ("I like my women fat, vicious, and not too smart"); it’s a little slick, and so is Miklós Rózsa’s score. But Minnelli, adapting Irving Stone’s novel, shows us Vincent down in the mines of Borinage; shows us his obsession with his cousin Kee (Jeanette Sterke) in the right one-dimensional terms ("I need love"); makes Sien (Pamela Brown), the prostitute he takes up with, kind but not nice; shows us Joseph Roulin (Niall MacGinnis) helping him find the Yellow House in Arles; shows realistic arguments between Van Gogh and Gauguin (Vincent likes Millet, Paul likes Degas; Paul points out that he’s done manual labor). Theo’s wife, Jo (Toni Gerry), looks like June Lockhart, and the scene where after crows attack Vincent he paints them into his wheatfield is unfortunate. But you could do worse.

Paul Cox’s Vincent (May 22 at 5:45 p.m. and May 25 at 11 p.m.) is, of course, an entirely different animal. John Hurt reads from Vincent’s letters to Theo over locations (lots of windmills and trains and birds flying) and re-enactments. Kee and Sien both look right, and hearing about Vincent’s experiences in his own words gives the film a unique authenticity. But Vincent’s letters are couched largely in platitudes and clichés. For every insight ("We take death to reach a star") there are innumerable self-justifications and rationalizations, and he’s not very edifying about his illness or his art. An outside perspective would have helped.

Like Robert Altman’s, except that I have no idea what he’s trying to do in Vincent & Theo (May 29 at 5:30 p.m. and June 9 at 10:30 a.m.). The concept seems to be that the two brothers, complementary in appearance and lifestyle, share a special bond that the world didn’t understand. But Altman’s Theo (Paul Rhys) looks like a refugee from the Anthony Blanche set in Brideshead Revisited, clean-shaven and effete (the real Theo looked much like his older brother). Sien (Jip Wijngaarden) comes off like Barbra Streisand as a Dutch hooker; Jo (Johanna ter Steege) is convincing enough, but Vincent himself (Tim Roth) is sullen and surly and without positive energy, and Altman’s trademark debunking of the rich and vapid is in place. It all acts out more like 1990, and in any case the foundation idea that Theo was more devoted to his brother than to his wife is shaky.

Granted, next to Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (May 25 at 1 p.m. and June 1 at 10:30 a.m.), Vincent & Theo looks like a documentary. Pialat confines his palette to Vincent’s final 67 days in Auvers, and that would have been a good idea — two hours is never enough to represent a whole lifetime — if he hadn’t made it all up. This Vincent (Jacques Dutronc) is still carrying a torch for Cathy (Ilsa Zylberstein), the actress/prostitute he met in Arles, and when she shows up in Auvers, they go for rolls in the hay whenever he can get away from the adoring Marguerite (Alexandra London), Dr. Gachet’s 21-year-old daughter (12-year-old Adeline Ravoux also has her eye on this lady killer). Mostly Van Gogh is about Vincent and Marguerite, and, as Vincent says at one point about his painting, it’s all crap. Even his illness (most likely temporal-lobe epilepsy and manic depression) is botched. Looks great, and it’s fun to watch (the punctilious homage to the Grand March in John Ford’s Fort Apache is spooky), but any resemblance to Vincent’s actual life is purely coincidental.

As for Vincent et moi (June 8 at 10:30 a.m.), which I wasn’t able to see, it stars Nina Petronzio as Jo, a 13-year-old artist whose drawings are bought by a dealer and then sold for $1 million as genuine Van Goghs — whereupon Jo decides she needs to consult with Vincent himself. The self-aggrandizing concept sounds a bit much, but the suggested surreal humor would be a welcome addition to the Van Gogh canon.

Issue Date: May 16 - 23, 2002
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