As typically illustrated on celluloid, the painter’s palette is imagined as a vibrant creative conduit, a channel from which color – and by extension life, passion and conflict – springs copiously. Great art movies such as Lust for Life, Mr. Turner and Andrei Rublev conceive of painterly practice as a fraught but rapturous process, locating drama in the unassailable urge to create and the accompanying vagaries of pursuing such drives. Final Portrait, while not quite on the level of the above examples, does something similar and in far more subdued fashion, adapting its aesthetic from that of the work of its subject, an approach which leaves it feeling admirably even-handed on the topic of artistic accomplishment. In assembling an account of the last painting completed by Alberto Giacometti, embodied here by Geoffrey Rush as a depressive perfectionist never satisfied with his output, the film draws up a murky palette of slate greys and midnight blues, using these to cement its portrayal of such production as a slow-burn struggle with dissatisfaction and doubt.
This focus on an ambivalent, rather than heroically tortured, painter means that instead of a grand studio overflowing with incomplete masterpieces, we get a cramped, debris-strewn room, flatulent squelches emitted from flattened paint tubes, muted colors plopped out on the palette with all the grace of errant goose turds. Instead of theatrically composed demons, the opponent is the niggling sense that no matter the effort expended, the final product will always fall far short of that conceived by the imagination. Giacometti’s studio is further dominated by his unearthly sculptural work, with thin, loping figures that envision movement itself as something eerie; his pieces famously started as miniatures and over time grew progressively taller, while continuing to use the same amount of material. The same arduous process of alteration is inflicted upon the writer James Lord (Armie Hammer) here presented as a figure who’s a touch or two too majestic for this sodden, dirt-flecked Parisian milieu.
After befriending Giacometti while writing a laudatory profile, Lord is flattered by the Swiss artist’s offer to sit for a portrait. Excited to enshrine himself as part of the famous painter’s pantheon, he’s instead introduced to the harsh realities of his new friend’s technique, forced to delay his flight back to New York again and again as Giacometti tussles with his canvas, repeatedly obliterating all progress with a few furious brushstrokes. The pithy, self-deprecating craftsman continually disparages Lord’s face, comparing him to a criminal or a lunatic, snide comments that are less about what he sees than what he seeks, as he attempts to reveal the banal grotesquerie buried beneath the writer’s blandly handsome facade.
In depicting this quiet artistic combat, Tucci continues his directorial fascination with process, specifically the usually hidden piecework that goes toward the shaping of a monumental end product. Final Portrait falls neatly in line with the measured, meditative observations of Big Night, in which food functions as an expressive outlet for two otherwise inarticulate brothers, and the mad meanderings of Joe Gould’s Secret, a movie about a genius incapable of creating anything beyond his own personal legend.
One thing this film lacks, however, is the presence of Tucci himself, likely since the 57-year-old director didn’t find himself appropriately Olympian enough to portray his statuesque subject. The only issue here is that Hammer ends up playing the character as an approximation of how his director might tackle him, leaving us with Hammer playing Tucci playing Lord. This doesn’t quite work, although Rush impressively holds things together as the dark-hearted, emotionally stunted virtuoso, a man only tolerable because he’s as hard on himself as he is on others. He anchors the film, propelling memorable scenes where he plows through a multi-course meal in two minutes flat, carries on a ridiculous affair with a female model in full view of his harried wife, or just drops expressive f-bombs while scowling at his canvas. All this provides for propulsive grist in a movie that otherwise operates in a strictly minimalist mode, a systematic exploration of the ancient, eternal dictum: life is short, and art is long.
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