JOLLY DAYS

Vincent and Theo and Bob

From the first clunking piano notes and the tinkly “modern music” that pursues you through the movie, the kind of music that is designed to gain attention by irritation, you know Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo is doomed.

Tim Roth slobs himself up, making van Gogh a repellant creature. Roth thinks the mental problems van Gogh suffered could be best expressed as leering coarseness. Altman stated, on an interview segment on the DVD, that van Gogh couldn't “make anything up” — that he had no imagination, but had to have “the thing in front of him”. This is a curious example of blindness from someone dealing in a visual medium. If Altman thinks van Gogh's work replicates, as conventional realism, he has a real problem. His lack of understanding of the way imagination can express itself through figuration betrays the cluelessness of the entertainment industry as a whole, because Altman is about as sophisticated as it gets in popular media. To give you an idea of the dissociation of this director from his material: the movie was populated with art student's copies of van Gogh's paintings which Altman said were fine, because his camera always was moving, so you “wouldn't notice”. You don't have to know much about art to know these crummy copies were just that. Altman was sliming van Gogh and his audience in one swell foop.

Altman's take on van Gogh's great letters, an impressive group of documents expressing the struggles in creating art and the bond between brothers in what amounted to a shared enterprise, is reduced in Altman's mind to pleading for money. Altman said in a Fresh Air interview that van Gogh was a parasite who only thought about himself. An interesting remark considering…

Altman's son — who works for him as a production designer — said that wherever his father is when making a movie, “he is always the star, no matter who is on the set”. This was supposed to be a compliment — not a revelation of narcissistic self-regard.

The passion and interior density of van Gogh's work, in which his soul is made manifest, is an artistic and human triumph. Altman's movie had nice costumes.