At Eternity's Gate - New Van Gogh biopic

I found At Eternity's Gate to be a "very good" film, perhaps one of the year's ten best releases. I generally disdain constant shaky camerawork, with a prime example being this fall's First Man, directed by Damien Chazelle. The shaky camera makes sense when we see Neil Armstrong in the cockpit of his jet, struggling to land after his nearly-orbital X-15 flight. But why is the camera still shaking several scenes later in an objective shot of Armstrong and his wife in their bedroom? And why does it constantly shake throughout the film, regardless of the scene or sequence? Many a contemporary movie has been harmed by this pseudo-artistic technique. 

Thus at first, I found the shaky camera in At Eternity's Gate to be distracting. Very quickly, though, I recognized that the shaky camera here represented something different—that it possessed a genuine purpose. By the time that I saw Van Gogh conversing on the street corner with Paul Gaugin a few scenes into the film, I figured out that there was a real motivation at play and that director Julian Schnabel was seeking to often place the viewer in the position of the camera, to effectively turn the viewer into an invisible voyeur. Thus I quickly embraced the shaky camera technique in this instance, for the director was using it differently and for a particular purpose. Much later, the film explicitly confirmed that intention when Van Gogh talked about feeling as if he was haunted by an invisible spirit. 

Generally, the shaky camera is objective yet very close to Van Gogh—just in front of him, or just to the side, or on his shoulder, or just behind him. On other occasions, the shaky camera fulfills the purpose of subjective point-of-view shots. In both cases, the motivation appears to be to bring the viewer closer to Van Gogh and try to let him or her share the artist's heightened experience, bordering on derangement or nature-inspired ecstasy. And the purpose is also to emphasize Van Gogh's haunted quality, his sense of being invisibly demonized. Overall, the technique renders this film something more daring, intimate, and visceral than the usual biopic. 

The blurry focus that you refer to is less explicable and somewhat harder to defend. Schnabel only seemed to use it during subjective shots involving Van Gogh; was he suggesting that the painter possessed a physical or psychological blind spot? That technique was intriguing yet less effective. 

Having all the actors speaking English briefly struck me as curious during the film, but then, Loving Vincent used the same technique, and, hey, so did Steven Spielberg for Schindler's List. Matters can be more efficient that way, if also less accurate historically. But not having the actors speak English in a neutral accent makes sense in the sense that if continentals were going to be speaking English, it probably would have been heavily accented. 

Overall, I felt that At Eternity's Gate was wonderful visually—in part by using replicas of Van Gogh's paintings—and proved poignant without indulging sentimentality. It combined passionate ethos with dry pathos, and while the analogy was a bit strained, it also made sense given the film's thematic explorations. And the film's techniques were also innovative and really situated the viewer in Van Gogh's physical and psychological milieu. Ultimately, At Eternity's Gate makes for a splendid complement to last year's genuinely "great" Loving Vincent, which deserved the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over the colorful yet far more pedestrian Coco.