Movie Review Loving Vincent

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2017 - Spoiler alerts One of the most beautiful, and unique animated movies ever made, a biopic of Vincent Van Goch. While most animation studies, including Pixar and Disney have moved from hand drawn animation cells to digital, this movie creates each of it 65,000 frames in original hand crafted rotoscoped oil painting, each in the style of Van Goch himself, created by a team of over a hundred classically trained artists over four years. Van Goch’s story is well known, but the movie takes a different approach and explores some of the more controversial theories, including the possibility that the bullet that killed him was not fired in an act of suicide at all. Plot wise, Armand Roulin, (played by Douglas Booth) was a young man who featured in several of Van Goch’s portraits. A year after the death of the artist, Roulin’s father, a retired postman (also painted by Van Goch) is asked to hand deliver a letter to Theo, Van Goch’s brother. The letter is from Vincent Van Goch, his last ever correspondence. Roulin asks various Parisians about Van Goch as he sets about his quest. He discovers that Theo Van Goch died soon before his visit, and that he really now needs to get the letter to Theo’s widow, Roulin picks up conflicting accounts of Van Goch’s last few months and especially the final days of his life. Though he had been confined to an asylum for clinical depression the last six weeks of his life he had seemed quite happy and carefree despite poverty. Why therefore did he suddenly relapse so badly as to take his own life within a very short period of time? Also, why shoot himself in the stomach, at an angle from which holding a gun to yourself would be very awkward? (I tried the hand positioning myself and though not impossible it is very hard). To cap it all, a bullet fired at such point-blank range hould have gone clean through the body but the bullet in Van Goch was lodged in his belly (it was the septic wound that killed him, two day later as doctors felt unable to remove it). A clean hot to head or heart would be more practical. That he was shot by a third party seems credible. Also, there are questions a to whether Van Goch was shot in the fields or inside a barn owned by one of two local women Van Goch may or may not have had intimate relations with. Van Goch got into drunken brawls with local boatmen, and a young boy Rene Secretan, who had learning difficulties, often tormented Van Goch, distracting him when he was trying to paint in the fields and by the riverside. The boy was believed to have a gun which he waved around during his mischievous rampages round the area. One theory is that Van Goch may have been accidentally shot by the boy (there are no suggestions that he was murdered). A final theory is that Van Goch learned only days before the shooting that in borrowing money for painting supplies from his brother, Theo, Van Goch was contributing to Theo’s own ill-health, (generated by advanced stage Syphilis). Could this shocking revelation have pushed Van Goch to take his own life? Roulin gets the letter out to Theo’ widow through the local doctor, who closes the film by reading a lovely thank you letter to Roulin from her. The closing credits show three pictures of each figure in the film, the actor playing the part, the portrait creation used in the film, and the portrait done of each by Van Goch too. It is a wonderful close to the film that reminds the viewer of the amazing work that made the film possible. Though it won many international awards it lost out at the recent Oscars to competition from the conventional animated feature, Coco. I watched the movie as a study in cinema relating to mental health issues. Van Goch’s life seems tried and tested textbook case study for that, as demonstrated by the earlier live action biopic, Lust For Life, tarring Kirk Douglas, but in many way this movie purposely moves away from that theory to explore the impact of Vincent’s death on the people left behind, and explores other possible reasons behind his death, passion, accidental death, a close community hiding its secrets. As great as the movie is, it probably disqualifies itself as a study of mental health despite centring around one of the most famous subjects of such concerns of all. Vincent himself is very elusive and enigmatic in this film, which shows many conflicting accounts of his last days, but purposely does not emphasise which ones if any the film makers consider the most accurate. What they do achieve is to show Van Goch’s genius, and his fabulous art at its best, and that is how to remember him, rather than as the troubled young man who severed part of his own ear and shot himself in the stomach. Arthur Chappell