Movie review: First fully oil-painted feature film 'Loving Vincent' is an artistic accomplishment

An abbreviated version of this review appears in Friday's Weekend Life section of The Oklahoman. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.

Movie review: 'Loving Vincent'

Thousands of paintings come to dazzling life in “Loving Vincent,” an animated period piece that must be one of the most visually striking and innovative films in cinema history.

Considered the world’s first fully oil-painted feature film, “Loving Vincent” is a fictionalized biopic of legendarily brilliant artist and troubled soul Vincent van Gogh told in a way that uniquely showcases his instantly recognizable masterworks. Writer-directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman spent six years on the Polish-U.K. labor of love, and it isn’t hard to see why: Every one of the film’s 65,000 frames is an actual oil painting hand-painted by one of 125 professional oil painters.

As with the Richard Linklater films “A Scanner Darkly” and “Waking Life,” “Loving Vincent” was first shot as a live-action film. It was then hand-painted over frame-by-frame, with the artists not only emulating van Gogh’s distinctive style but actually reproducing specific paintings. There are 94 of the Dutch master’s paintings featured in forms close to the originals, plus 31 additional van Gogh works that are substantially or partially featured.

Even more impressive, the painters managed to create cinematic portraits that are not only recognizable as van Gogh’s subjects but also as the actors playing the characters in a sort of detective story based on the controversial circumstances surrounding van Gogh’s tragic death at the age of 37. Although it has been widely accepted that the disturbed artist committed suicide, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith made the case in their 2011 best-seller “Van Gogh: The Life” that the painter may actually have been shot by a teenage boy. 

Set in 1891, about a year after van Gogh’s death, the film follows aimless, hard-drinking brawler Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), who is dispatched by his father, Postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), to deliver a long-lost letter from Vincent van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk) to his beloved brother Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz) in Paris. Embarrassed by his father’s friendship with van Gogh, who was committed to an asylum after cutting off his own ear and gifting it to a prostitute, Armand takes on the task reluctantly.

In Paris, respected paint supplier Pere Tanguy (John Sessions) informs Armand that Theo died shortly after Vincent. But his stories about van Gogh’s tormented genius – as well as his suspicions about the artist’s physician, Dr. Paul Gachet (Jerome Flynn) -- intrigue Armand enough to travel to Auvers-sur-Oise, the quiet French village where the painter died.

When he arrives in the country hamlet, the doctor is out for a few days, so Armand begins chatting up the locals who knew van Gogh: the doctor’s harsh housekeeper, Louise Chevalier (Helen McCrory), who despised the artist; the innkeeper’s daughter, Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson), who adored him; the doctor’s daughter, Marguerite Gachet (Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan), who takes flowers to van Gogh’s grave every day; and the boatman (Aidan Turner), who often observed the painter during his art-making activities. Armand sifts through the differing opinions about van Gogh and the strange circumstances leading up to his death in the hopes of finding the truth.

The film’s pace and Clint Mansell’s score are sometimes a bit uneven, but the mystery is engrossing, especially as the painted images shift from color for present-day events to black and white for flashbacks. The filmmakers make compelling arguments for both death theories, leaving it to the viewers to draw their own conclusions, and deserve kudos for neither romanticizing nor underplaying van Gogh’s apparent mental illness.

Although the hand-painted animation might be mistaken for a well-meaning gimmick, Kobiela and Welchman seem to have taken van Gogh’s famous words “We cannot speak other than by our paintings” to heart. By bringing his brightly colored canvases to full, moving life, sometimes with dizzying effect, they allow us to get a possible glimpse into the world as the troubled artist saw it, which makes “Loving Vincent” quite the artistic accomplishment.

“Loving Vincent” shows at 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Thursday and 2 and 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive. For information and tickets, go to www.okcmoa.com.

-BAM