At Eternity’s Gate trailer: Willem Dafoe bears uncanny resemblance to a Van Gogh self-portrait in new biopic

With his ginger beard, straw hat and a sad, wounded expression, Willem Dafoe looks uncannily like a Vincent Van Gogh self-portrait, as he plays the artist in a biopic that premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Monday. CBS Films, which has acquired distribution rights to the film, dropped the official trailer of At Eternity’s Gate  on Wednesday. [caption id=“attachment_5129581” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. Image via Twitter[/caption] ( Also read — Vincent van Gogh film, At Eternity's Gate, claims artist was murdered ) At Eternity’s Gate begins with the impoverished Van Gogh in Paris in the 1880s where his paintings are, at best, ignored and, at worst, derided as incompetent. It follows him to the south of France, in and out of mental asylums, and ends with his death a couple of years later, at 37, with a bullet in his stomach that, in this film, is not the suicide that historians have speculated was the cause of death. Although he suffers blackouts and bouts of anger, his Van Gogh does not come across as mad, but certainly as someone suffering mental torment. Now revered as one of the greatest painters, Van Gogh famously died before his true artistic value had been recognised. “Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet,” he says in the film’s trailer. The movie is directed by Julian Schnabel, who made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and is himself an artist who recreated some of Van Gogh’s work for the film and helped Dafoe learn how to handle a paintbrush. Based on a screenplay written by Jean-Claude Carriere, At Eternity’s Gate also features Mads Mikkelsen, Rupert Friend as Theo Van Gogh, Mathieu Amalric as Dr. Paul Gachet, Emmanuelle Seigner as The Woman from Arles/Madame Ginoux and Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin. It is scheduled to release on 16 November. Watch the trailer here:

(With inputs from Reuters)