MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Vincent’ Delivers Lasting High From Art, Soul of the Man

In telling--showing us, really--the life of Vincent van Gogh, whose career as an artist lasted 10 years, who sold one painting during his lifetime, who died at the age of 37 and was followed in death six months later by his devoted brother Theo, director Paul Cox has done something quite astonishing.

With “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh” (Westside Pavilion), Cox has built a film from these sad statistics that is triumphant rather than downbeat. We see a life marked by isolation, by ridicule, by poverty of the cruelest sort, yet it’s possible to walk out of “Vincent” shattered but on a lasting high from the art and the soul of the man we’ve met this profoundly.

Cox, born in Holland, has made pungent and accessible translations of the Van Gogh letters; he emerges in dimensions as bold and sharp as one of his own paintings. Cox shows us the passionate, troubled thinker who sought his life long for “the white ray of light . . . the good.” What is lost--thankfully--is the simplistic image of Van Gogh as the crazy artist. “I am not ashamed to say that (this white light) exists,” he wrote to Theo, “and that I seek it, and only this do I consider simplicity.”

Cox’s method is neither documentary nor re-staging, but rather a blend of both. Van Gogh’s letters form the text, delivered over an Impressionistic view of the places he lived and worked. There are some scenes with the few women who crossed his path, silent moments with the letters and music by Vivaldi and Rossini as commentary and counterpoint. The film is strongest when Cox uses his camera like the eyes of the painter, wandering the roads, the fields and the small towns where Vincent’s work led him. His words come in the expressively shaded voice of John Hurt, who creates as full an arc of performance as he did in “The Elephant Man,” even though he remains unseen.

As he reads Vincent’s letters to Theo, we travel--chronologically--the same countryside the painter did, from Holland to the poor mining villages of Belgium and finally to France, from Paris to Arles, to Saint-Remy and Auvers. Cox’s camera is unashamedly lyrical; with Vincent’s fervor, he rejoices in nature.

In other, voiceless sequences, Cox moves into a village or a saloon or a dark, damp alleyway full of young, beckoning prostitutes, peopling them with the faces Van Gogh might have seen. One is the desperate pregnant woman, walking the streets when Van Gogh found her, with whom the painter lived. (After a considerable time with her and her child, Vincent finally had to leave; almost desperately he wrote to Theo: “She understands neither books nor art . . . she is not nice, not good.”) Cox tries to match that bruised, glum, despairing face that we glimpse in Vincent’s sketches. These are the film’s most literal and least effective moments.

The most stunning discovery for many will be how accidentally art fell into Van Gogh’s life. He had hoped to follow his father’s footsteps in the ministry. He began with “little drawings,” simply to show Theo where he was and what he saw. Gradually, however, art began to crowd out everything else. “Sometimes I draw . . . almost against my will, but it is a hard and difficult struggle to draw well.”

Then there is a clear moment when he abandons one road for the other. “I shall be a painter, be poor, be human.” When he was still pursuing his missionary work, he had written to Theo in a state of deep emotion after preaching for the first time. Vincent envisioned a pilgrim, all in black, who inquired, “Does the road go uphill all the way?” to be answered by his guardian spirit, “Yes, to the very end.” It could not have been a more prophetic insight.

The drawings, the letters and the paintings tumble over one another. He would do a thousand drawings and paintings in this feverish, compressed career--and when a rich acquaintance admired a painting of trees he’d just finished, he gave it to him. The progression of the work is stunning, it grows more sure, more complex, yet when Van Gogh calls his work “almost a cry of anguish,” it’s a cry made visible.

His distancing himself from reality enters slowly, then more insistently. When he painted “La Berceuse,” which he envisioned as a triptych, flanked by two sunflower paintings, he mentions that “to attain the high yellow tone, I had to be pretty keyed up.” He rhapsodizes about yellow: “How lovely (it) is--pale yellow, sulfur yellow, lemon yellow.” But the letters become more tormented: “All I seek in painting is a way to make life more bearable.”

Dealing with a guileless, bedeviled innocent who repeatedly calls himself “the lowest of the low,” Cox never loses track of the humble, despairing man who could write about himself at 30 that his missing teeth and his neglected appearance made him look 10 years older. (Listening to Vincent in this tone, it’s hard not to wonder whether greater human contact--something he simultaneously yearned for and made impossible--might not have deterred his encroaching illness, at least a while.)

In this tender homage to an almost impossible man, director Cox, a not-uncomplicated artist himself, may be working among devils he recognizes intimately. Fortunately for all of us, during his lifetime Vincent had the good, the selfless Theo behind him. Fortunately for all of us now, Vincent has the good, the selfless and the visionary Paul, to illuminate with such care the realm of the pure white light.

‘VINCENT: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF VINCENT VAN GOGH’

A Roxie Release of an Illumination Films production. Producer Tony Llewellyn-Jones. Writer-director Paul Cox. Words, Vincent van Gogh. Read by John Hurt. Camera, editor Cox. Production design Neil Angwin, Paul Ammitzboll, Richard Stringer. Music Vivaldi, Rossini, Norman Kaye.

Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature