Schnabel takes a fresh look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh, and in the process revivifies our sense of the artist as a living, feeling human being. The film strips everything down to essentials, fusing the sensual, the emotional, and the spiritual. The pulsing heart of At Eternity’s Gate is Dafoe’s shattering performance: his Vincent is at once lucid, mad, brilliant, helpless, defeated, and, finally, triumphant.
We review At Eternity’s Gate in our March film podcast. It starts at the 6.23 mark…