Will you look at the on-the-nose emotional triggers in this trailer? Right away you can smell the calculation, the family-friendly pablum, etc.

I haven’t time to write even a half-assed review of Julian Schnabel‘s Vincent Van Gogh film, At Eternity’s Gate, but it does deliver an intimate channelling of the visions and torment that surged within this angst-ridden impressionist, and the effect is fairly on-target. The film is more into communion than visions — intuitions, intimacy, revelations.

As Schnabel said during the post-screening press conference, “Rather than a movie about Van Gogh, I wanted to make a film in which you are Van Gogh.” He’s more or less done that, I feel. Which pretty much says it all.

Is Willem Dafoe‘s performance as Van Gogh the best thing he’s done since The Last Temptation of Christ, which was 30 friggin’ years ago? I’d say so, yeah. Dafoe seems to be so open to the ache of this poor man, and immersing himself so completely in his emotional, artistic and spiritual struggles, that (I realize I’ve said this a few times over the years) he really doesn’t seem to be performing or pretending. I wish I could think of some other way to say this, but whatever.

The interesting part is that Dafoe, now in his early 60s, is 25 years older than Van Gogh was when he died at 37, and yet this isn’t a problem. You don’t even think of it. Poor Vincent was so bothered and self-flagellating that Dafoe looking somewhat older than a guy in his mid 30s…well, of course.

The other thing is a scene in which Van Gogh, temporarily incarcerated in a mental asylum, has a somewhat testy conversation with a doubting priest (Mads Mikkelsen). The priest is softly contemptuous, saying in so many words that he thinks Van Gogh’s paintings simply aren’t very good, and that he’s almost certainly deluding himself by thinking that God meant him to pick up a brush.

Van Gogh responds just as softly that he might be painting for people who haven’t been born yet (or words to that effect). The instant Dafoe said this some guy sitting behind me went “uhm-huh” and I muttered the same thing to myself — “That’s right…that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

Schnabel: “This is a film about painting and a painter and their relationship to infinity. It is told by a painter. It contains what I felt were essential moments in his life. This is not the official history — it’s my version. One that I hope could make you closer to him.”

George Clooney remarks at Variety’s Power of Women event in Los Angeles: “When you call an entire religion your enemy, you might very well make an enemy out of an entire religion. When you tell a whole race of people that you value them less, you can’t be surprised when they question your values. When you tell women that coming forward to testify about their abuse is a joke, don’t be shocked when they’re standing on your lawn, laughing on November 7.

“After all the jokes and insults and reality show frenzy, what will be remembered, what will stand the test of time, is holding responsible these wolves in wolves’ clothing.”

HE to Clooney: I hope you know something I don’t. I hope that the blue wave turns out to be as real and formidable as many of us hope. Thing is, an awful lot of women voted for Donald Trump two years ago, and there were even a fair number of Trump Hispanics that turned out. People think and behave in amazingly stupid and lazy ways. Just when you think they can’t get any dumber, they defy your expectations. Here’s hoping things work out for the better.

Hollywood Elsewhere will catch today’s 3 pm New York Film Festival press screening of Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate. The CBS Films release (opening on 11.16) is a Vincent Van Gogh-in-Arles film that allegedly contains Willem Dafoe‘s greatest performance since The Last Temptation of Christ. The costars are Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner and Niels Arestrup.

I know the territory to some extent. I’ve been to Arles. I’ve stood inches away from some of Van Gogh’s paintings at the Musee D’Orsay. I’m very familiar with the Montmartre apartment building that Vincent and Theo shared in 1886 or thereabouts. I’ve seen Vincente Minnelli‘s Lust for Life a couple of times. All of it, the whole Van Gogh ride, all my life.

I don’t want to deal with James McAvoy again. Really. Willis and Jackson, whatever, but please, not McAvoy….please. Universal will nonetheless open Glass on 1.18.09.

Studio boilerplate: “Following the conclusion of Split, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) pursues Kevin Wendell Crumb’s (James McAvoy) superhuman persona of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters while the shadowy presence of Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), going by ‘Mr. Glass’, emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.”

I’ve said this a couple of times, but now that Damien Chazelle‘s First Man has begun its commercial run, please try and catch it in a real IMAX theatre. The moon landing sequence at the end is 40% to 50% better on an IMAX screen, I swear.

Key HE observation: “Chazelle’s film operates so closely to the personality of the low-key Neil Armstrong that to some it feels chilly and remote-feeling and a little too tech-heady. But this isn’t a problem for me at all.

“One thing I really like about First Man is Chazelle’s refusal to do the Ron Howard thing by cutting to wide or establishing shots for standard perspective’s sake. Instead Chazelle keeps us inside the cockpit seat alongside Neil almost the whole time. And Ryan Gosling‘s subdued, often muted performance is actually daring in its own way — he’s delivering the full emotional boatload but in spare, somber, minimalist fashion.”

Pull-quote from Tomriss Laffly’s Film Journal review: “Damien Chazelle’s technically astonishing First Man is a poetic non-blockbuster of claustrophobic intimacy.”

To hear it from The Limey‘s Terry Valentine (i.e., Peter Fonda), 1966 was the only year in which “the ’60s” were fully in flower. There were countless manifestations — spiritual, creative — and hints of coming disturbances. April ’66 saw the famous Time magazine cover that asked “Is God dead?”, which was used by Roman Polanski during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby a year later. The following month saw the release of Bob Dylan‘s Blonde On Blonde (and the coughing heat pipes in “Visions of Johanna”) and Brian Wilson‘s Pet Sounds, and three months later Revolver, the Beatles’ “acid album” which turned out to be their nerviest and most leap-forwardy, was released. All kinds of mildly trippy, tingly, unnerving things were popping all over.

But you’d never guess what was happening to go by the mood, tone and between-the-lines repartee during the 39th Oscar Awards, which honored the best films of 1966 but aired in April ’67, or roughly seven weeks before the release of Sgt. Pepper. Bob Hope‘s opening monologue is punishing, almost physically painful to endure. And look…there’s Ginger Rogers!

Fred Zinneman‘s A Man For All Seasons won six Oscars that night — Picture, Director (Fred Zinneman), Actor (Paul Scofield), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction — and there’s no question that it still “plays”. Well acted, beautifully written by Robert Bolt. But it also feels a bit smug by today’s standards, a little too starchy and theatrical.

What 1966 films play best by 2018 aesthetic standards? Certainly The Sand Pebbles, which should have won Best Picture, and which contained Steve McQueen‘s most open-hearted, career-best performance. The second best ’66 film by my yardstick was and is Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blowup (that London-based film completely absorbed and reflected what was going in in late ’65 and ’66). The third finest was Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals, a crafty, ace-level western actioner that plays beautifully by today’s measure and which contains Lee Marvin‘s second-best performance (after “Walker” in ’67’s Point Blank).

Other ’66 hotties: Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Lewis Gilbert‘s Alfie, John Frankenheimer‘s Seconds and Grand Prix, Milos Forman‘s Loves of a Blonde, Billy Wilder‘s The Fortune Cookie, Norman Jewison‘s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Claude Lelouch‘s A Man and a Woman, Gille Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, Richard Lester‘s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pier Paolo Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Karel Reisz‘s Morgan!, or a Suitable Case for Derangement.

For the most part Bohemian Rhapsody is a so-so, run-of-the-mill, by-the-numbers famous rock band saga, but I loved Rami Malek‘s appropriately showy performance as Freddie Mercury (especially during the last third) and being a longtime Queen fan I REALLY LOVED THE MUSICAL PORTIONS…hell, everyone will.

And of course (everyone’s been saying this) the film REALLY PULLS OUT THE STOPS for the Live Aid finale, and for this section alone the film is more than worth the price. It’s a guaranteed hit, of course, and a likely (all but certain?) Best Actor nomination for Malek.

(tapped out on iPhone, 10:15 pm…rain has stopped, streets are damp and reflecting)

Two days ago a critic friend warned that First Man may come under fire “on the level of identity politics. It’s the portrait of a stalwart ’50s straight-arrow white man and his hand-wringing, stand-by-your-man wife. So therefore it must be hated. It will be interesting this week to see if critics carry the identity-politics ball on this, in which ‘too cold’ becomes a metaphor for ‘too much in the way of tight-ass straight white guy material.’”

Yesterday The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody walked right into this narrative in a piece called “Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong Biopic Is an Accidental Right-Wing Fetish Object“:

Significant passage: “Except for the protesters, First Man is whiter than a Fred-and-Ginger ballroom set.

“There are no Hidden Figures here; Neil, an engineer, does his own fancy calculations, thank you very much. The vast team effort to make the moon landing possible is reduced to background extras. The movie is centered on astronauts, who interact briefly with a handful of administrators and scientists; there are wives and children; and, otherwise, there are minions who line the corridor and cheer as Neil and his colleagues pass by on the way to the capsule. The moon mission was as much a matter of media as it was of science. The iconic moments of the moon landing are great television, and it took significant thought and labor on the part of NASA to figure out how to capture them.

“But Chazelle isn’t interested in process, or in how the facts were transformed into legend. Instead, he filters the legend to render it even more monumentally, unequivocally, inhumanly heroic.”

The invisible subtitle of Peter Hedges‘ Ben Is Back (Roadside, 12.7) is “oh, what a tangled mess we make of our lives when we trust our formerly drug-addicted sons and daughters to act like they’re past it and totally clean.” Doesn’t usually work that way. Julia Roberts’ too-trusting mom is the standout element; Lucas Hedges (heavier than in Manchester By The Sea and wearing a tennis–ball haircut) is the druggie son. A better-than-decent film that runs on a clock, the whole story unfolding within a 12-hour time period (or something like that).