#1264 At Eternity's Gate
Verfasst: 2019-04-08 23:59
Three in a row - the sneak tonight treated us to yet another biopic. "At Eternity's Gate" is the sixth feature film by the american painter and director Julian Schnabel, who is a late bloomer where movies are considered. After all, he was already well into his forties when he directed the biopic "Basquiat" about the New Yorker street artist of the same name. After that, he portraited the cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas in "Before Night Falls", before adapting the memoirs of journalist and stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby into the french-language film "Le scaphandre et le papillon." His last film before "At Eternity's Gate" was only semi-biographical - the controversial novel "Miral" by Rula Jebreal was a fictionalized story based on her childhood memories, and turned out to be Schnabel's most divisive work to date. Eight years later, he has returned to his roots and recounts the life of painter Vincent van Gogh - making some curious choices, like letting 63-year old Willem Dafoe to play van Gogh, who died at age 37 (a role for which Dafoe got his fourth Oscar nomination) and selecting 40-year old Oscar Isaac to play his older friend Paul Gaugin.
The trailer shows more of the sylistic choices of director Schnabel:
How did you like "At Eternity's Gate"? How would you rate the performance by Mr. Dafoe, who is in almost every scene of the movie? How about the supporting cast, from Oscar Isaac to Rupert Friend as van Gogh's brother Theo, Mathieu Amalric as van Gogh's psysician and Emmanuelle Seigner as his landlady on to Mads Mikkelsen as a priest? How did you like the camera work, the soundtrack and the scenes which were just audio to a black screen? Please write down your thought about this movie as a reply to this post. You can also paint a picture if you like.
In Anbetracht der Tatasache, daß längst nicht alle Szenen so verwackelt waren - und es immer ganz bestimmte (leider viel zuviele) Szenen waren, die so aufgenommen wurden - möchte ich Kameramann Benoît Delhomme da in Schutz nehmen und den Verdacht äußern, daß dies auf Geheiß des Regisseurs passierte. Delhomme hat jedenfalls schon mehrfach - auch in der Sneak mit "The Merchant of Venice" (Sneak #0543), "A Most Wanted Man" (#1021) und zuletzt "The Theory of Everything" (#1040) - bewiesen, daß er zu besserer Kameraführung in der Lage ist. 
Für die Akten: nach der ersten Viertelstunde gab es nur noch sehr wenige, kurze französische Sequenzen mit englischen Untertiteln - von einem aus dem Off gesprochenen Schlußzitat von Paul Gaugin mal abgesehen, das den Abspann unterbrach.