It’s been a number of years since I saw the 1956 film on Vincent Van Gogh, Lust For Life, based on the Irving Stone novel, directed by Vincente Minnelli, but I recall it was far superior to this tripe. There, Vincent was played by Kirk Douglas as a passionate artist, with problems, whose work was at the forefront. Altman has Roth play Vincent as a raging psychopath with a brush. Theo was seen, in the earlier film, as a sane man, while Altman casts his syphilitic Theo as almost as nuts as his older brother. The earlier film also had a very memorable soundtrack, scored by Miklos Rosza, whereas Gabriel Yared uses an odd industrial rock soundtrack which infects the film with dissonant sounds that seem to portray Vincent Van Gogh as a punk rocker, not a tormented artist, and this even during a scene where Vincent is being eulogized as he lays in his casket. Bizarre, awful, and wholly inappropriate.
Unfortunately, virtually every scene- save the first, where Altman wisely intercuts the opening scene of the two brothers in an argument over Vincent’s decision to ‘become an artist’ with a London auctioning of Van Gogh’s work for millions of dollars- in this dismally long film is like that cemetery scene. There is no sense to be made from this film, save that great artists suffer, syphilis rots the mind, and the arts world is filled with phonies and sycophants. This is what this film was needed for? Both Rhys and Roth play the brothers Van Gogh in one note (or two): weird and weirder. Yes, we see brief snippets of the women in their lives, such as Theo’s shrewish and selfish wife Jo Bonger (Johanna Ter Steege), and a few other hangers-on, but none with a significant enough role to leave an impact.
A clip:
This is possibly Robert Altman's worst film.
