‘Loving Vincent’: A moving canvas explores Van Gogh’s final days

THE X-PAT FILES By Scott Garceau (The Philippine Star) | Updated November 13, 2017 - 12:00am
0For Loving Vincent, an animated retelling of artist Vincent Van Gogh’s final days in Auvers-sur-
Oise, France (distributed here by Solar Entertainment), we are told some 123 artists hand-painted
62,000 movie frames to simulate the Dutch painter’s world and masterpieces.

That’s an average 6,000 paintings assigned per artist. On the other hand, Van Gogh reportedly
only sold one of his 800 paintings left behind in an eight-year flurry of creation before his death from a
gunshot wound. So Van Gogh, at the very least, has put a lot of other young painters to work a century
later.

Loving Vincent is a beauty to look at — all those shimmery starry nights and crosshatched wheat
fields and intricately shaded faces we sometimes recognize from Van Gogh’s work. It takes up the
mystery of the artist’s death, bandying many theories. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Did the town hate
him as an outsider? Or embrace his gentle, artistic nature? Armand (Douglas Booth), the somewhat
aimless and disinterested son of a letter carrier in Holland, is tasked to deliver a sealed note from
Vincent to his brother Theo that never reached him because of the artist’s death. Armand travels to
Auvers-sur-Oise, where Van Gogh had been under the medical care of Dr. Gachet (Jerome Flynn, whose
voice and face, even rendered in Van Gogh tones, is instantly recognizable as Bronn from Game of
Thrones).

While Vincent’s death is still a matter of debate, a postal errand is not necessarily the most
dramatic way to frame his turbulent life and existence. The revelations can feel clunky at times, lacking
propulsive force in the aftermath of the real dramatic full stop: the ending of the artist’s life with a
gunshot to the abdomen.

And while the film is visually striking, it eventually settles into a lulling pattern of handpainted
images, gently shimmering (some movie patrons reported taking catnaps while watching). The more
striking moments involve shifts between vibrant colors and black and white, or characters juxtaposed
against scenes we recall from Van Gogh’s paintings. At the very least, we can applaud the amount of
labor involved in blowing up each frame of the movie and decorating it in oil paint. Sure, it could have
been more easily accomplished by a computer or Rotoscoping. But where’s the tribute to human
suffering in that?

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By the end, Loving Vincent presents a more moving tribute to the artist in his own words and
those of his brother’s widow (read aloud from actual letters). That, and the lingering power of Van
Gogh’s paintings, make it worth an appreciative view.

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Loving Vincent is now showing. Distributed by Solar Entertainment.