Though he was playing a man who was about 25 years younger than his actual age, I could not imagine an actor doing a better job portraying the Dutch Post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh than Willem Dafoe (Platoon, The Boondock Saints). It’s a performance that will net Dafoe his third Best Actor nomination (he also has a Best Supporting Nom for 2017’s The Florida Project), and it could be the one that nets him his first Oscar win. While I don’t think it will happen (and I don’t have a particular reason why in this year’s wide-open field), it will be a movie that many people will see who might not otherwise be interested in a biopic on this person. At Eternity’s Gate worked for me. I am often willing to give a biopic a chance unless I find many of the film’s portrayals fictionalized. I don’t think anything upsets me more than a story claiming to be true that turns out to be anything but factual. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Julian Schnabel’s (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,  Lou Reed’s Berlin) stylistic character study of one of the most famous and mystifying artists of all time. Filmed as artistically as Van Gogh lived his life, Schnabel exceeded the confines of a conventional biopic and created something that felt new and refreshing, regardless of the darkness in which Van Gogh lived.

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