I have one favorite scene in the film VINCENT AND THEO, the late Robert Altman’s highly acclaimed masterwork on the life of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. It is a short brutal scene in the first half of the movie when Van Gogh’s model and mistress is leaving him: she slaps him witless, and then kisses him hard on the mouth before storming out of the apartment.

That double action of pained frustration and loving adoration seems a sad but accurate metaphor for the entire film and possibly for Van Gogh himself. Whereas life bestowed upon him a bliss-filled kiss of exceptional artistic and spiritual vision, the hand of fate slapped him so hard that he was robbed of any lasting personal joy that might have come from this great gift.

Van Gogh (in the film played brilliantly by Tim Roth) is one of those creative geniuses of history whose life story continues to haunt and inform us from one century to the next. The question is "Why?" Could it be because the beauty and evidence of that genius continues to increase with time and therefore makes us wonder about the cultural values and “personalities” we tend to either champion or malign in modern days? That it definitely does increase can be measured in one sense by the millions of dollars for which this eighteenth century impressionist artist’s paintings now sell. 

The whole point of Altman’s film seems to be to illustrate how Vincent’s genius found refuge for a while in his brother Theo’s love. It is well known that even though Theo (who is played with mesmerizing neurotic precision by Paul Rhys) was a relatively successful art dealer, he was unable to manipulate the market to his brother’s advantage. That did not, however, stop him from financially supporting him throughout his short adult life as a painter. Altman makes that point clear enough when Theo informs his brother that the money Vincent thought their father had been sending him had in fact been provided by Theo. Rather than belaboring this aspect of their relationship, director Altman moves his camera back and forth between scenes that show us how very much alike, and yet simultaneously different, Vincent and Theo were in their thwarted pursuits of a triumphant life.

As Theo eagerly courted “respectable ladies,” Vincent just as eagerly enjoyed women of a certain profession. Whereas Vincent yearned to prove himself an artist worthy of the name, Theo yearned to prove himself a businessman worthy of prominence and prosperity. Vincent’s descent into madness manifests more tangibly because it takes on the more graphically visual qualities associated with art itself: we see him court and then violently alienate the attentions of his equally genius friend Paul Gauguin; watch him stick knives menacingly in his mouth, cut off his earlobe, meekly endure his stay in an asylum, stand in a sunlit field where he has been painting black birds and calmly shoot himself. All the while, some of the most celebrated canvases in art history, depicting a virtual of ecstasy of sunflowers, starry nights, and golden wheat fields, rapidly pile up.

Theo is actually able to resist the powerful tug of debilitating madness until after his brother succumbs to it.  That he does fall prey to it is tragically ironic because despite the syphilis that mars his happiness, he achieves some measure of the “ideal life” with a wife, new baby, and modest advancement in his career.  He therefore appears to have all the motivation necessary to sustain a stable existence. But when he places all of Vincent’s work (after the artist’s death) in a suite of rooms for an exhibit, he screams at his wife that “This is the most important thing in my life!” and forces her to leave. It would seem at that point that he not only loved Vincent and believed deeply in his talent, but was in fact a kind of extension of him, and vice versa. The loss of Vincent on July 29, 1890, at the age of only 37, triggered in Theo a mental and physical collapse. He died less than a year later on January 25, 1891, at the age of 33.

This 1990 movie (released on DVD in 2005) is 138 minutes long so no one can claim it’s too short. I only wish Altman had included somewhere in it the story of how––after studying for the ministry and before he became a painter––Vincent spent forty days nursing back to health a miner who had been injured in an explosion and whom doctors had expected to die. The miner’s recovery was described as a miracle and, from the scars left on his face, Van Gogh experienced a vision of the wounds that Christ suffered from the crown of thorns placed on his head. Some allusion to this may have added greater understanding to the intense spiritual impulses that drove Van Gogh’s devotion to his art and helped clarify what he hoped to communicate through it.  Even so, the film as it stands is itself a remarkable painting of two extraordinary brothers who shared one profound and astonishing destiny.

by Author-Poet Aberjhani

author of ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love

and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance