Both of the van Gogh brothers, the celebrated painter as well as the not-so-celebrated art dealer who couldn't "move" his sibling's paintings. This attention to Theo, while democratic in an almost parental way, subtracts more than it adds: it gives us less of Vincent, and, equally important, less of his actual work. Far less, for example, than in Minnelli's schoolmarmish Lust for Life, so that the movie in some ways is more like the typical screen biography of a writer, where the essence of the artist is of necessity kept off screen, and where the external excitements of his life have to carry the load: D.H. Lawrence, to say nothing of T.E. Lawrence, is always going to outscore Ford Madox Ford. Thus, we get the standard diet, though at somewhat reduced portions, of highly "photogenic" mad-artist behavior: throwing a painting across the room, putting the paint on the face instead of on the canvas, defacing a rival artist's work-in-progress, and of course cutting off the famous ear, albeit an ear obscured from view in a cracked mirror -- that time-worn symbol of lunacy. Robert Altman's phlegmatic camera and throwaway dialogue, not to mention the lulling rainfall on the soundtrack (not to mention, either, the Theo interruptions), help to soft-pedal the sensationalism to a remarkable degree, help to de-emphasize it, help, even, to dull it. But if Vincent and Theo successfully skirts the clichés and hyperboles of past screen biographies of artists, it hasn't another strong direction to pursue in their stead; it's strangely becalmed, indecisive, dawdling, doodling. And it inescapably is about the artist who most readily fuels such clichés and hyperboles, where it could have looked around for another artist altogether. Tim Roth, Paul Rhys. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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