Tampering with an artist’s memory can be dangerous business: In 2011, Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh published Van Gogh: The Life, an acclaimed biography arguing, among other things, that the Dutch painter’s gunshot death in July 1890, in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise, was no suicide, as scholars had agreed for years, but homicide at the hands of a local bully. The blowback from Van Gogh fans and art historians was severe. “Many [of these scholars] had done years of research and writing that was deeply embedded in the old narrative,” the authors explained in a Vanity Fair article three years after the book appeared. “They didn’t just disagree with our new reading; they were enraged by it. . . . [One] specialist, with whom we shared a stage at the opening of a Van Gogh exhibition in Denver, was so choked with indignation that he refused even to discuss the subject when the audience raised it.”
Armand (given voice and form by British actor Douglas Booth) brings his own unpleasant memories of Van Gogh to the story. In the opening sequence Armand drinks and broods in the diabolical red-green room we know from Van Gogh’s The Night Café on the Place Lamartine in Arles (1888). There’s bad blood between Armand and the other townspeople, who shunned his father, the kindly local postman, for refusing to sign their petition. Joseph Roulin (played with great tenderness by Chris O’Dowd of Bridesmaids) came to Van Gogh’s aid immediately after he severed his ear, and the postman still seethes at how his neighbors turned on the sick stranger in their midst. Rousting his drunken son from the Night Café, he recalls the calm and lucid letter he received from Van Gogh only six weeks before the painter died. Roulin can’t understand it: “How does a man go from being absolutely calm to suicidal in six weeks?”
Memory, Van Gogh learned, is more susceptible to emotion, and thus to exaggerations of color and form. Loving Vincent actually inverts this idea with its floridly colorful present-tense narrative and its drab, black-and-white flashbacks. But as Armand learns at the end of the movie, there’s no way to assemble all the conflicting recollections of Van Gogh into a portait more truthful than the stern self-portraits he left behind. And as Smith and Naifeh confirmed with their controversial book, who an artist really was doesn’t matter nearly as much as how people want to remember him. v
Directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman
