BASQUIAT
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Michael Wincott, Benicio Del Toro, Claire Forlani, David Bowie, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper. Screenplay: Julian Schnabel. Director: Julian Schnabel. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Yes, I understand: happy artists do not exactly make for compelling drama. Still, you have to admit that the Cult of the Tortured Artist seems to have more adherents in Hollywood than Scientology. Van Gogh in LUST FOR LIFE...tortured. Toulouse-Lautrec in MOULIN ROUGE...tortured. Mozart in AMADEUS, Beethoven in IMMORTAL BELOVED, Rimbaud in TOTAL ECLIPSE...call in Torquemada. So why is it that BASQUIAT feels so completely unique? Perhaps it is because, for a change, its principal character is portrayed as a tortured human being first and foremost. Art is connected to his suffering, but he does not suffer for his art.
This measured approach is surprising not just because write-director Julian Schnabel is a first-time film-maker, or because he was a friend of the film's subject, Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright), but because Schnabel himself is an artist of no small renown. It has been a characteristic of the works of artists-turned-auteurs (including Andy Warhol's and the ugly recent example of Robert Longo's JOHNNY MNEMONIC) that you could expect to find very little beyond the images. Schnabel does create some extremely arresting images, including a sharp opening title sequence underscored by The Pogues, but he has also left no doubt that this is a film about _someone_, about some_thing_. He tells of Basquiat's days as a homeless teen-ager in the late 70s, living in a cardboard box in New York and creating graffiti art with the recognizable tag of "SAMO." He is "discovered" by writer Rene Ricard (Michael Wincott), who introduces Basquiat into the circles of art dealers like Bruno Bischofberger (Dennis Hopper) and gallery owners like Mary Boone (Parker Posey). Before he even realizes it, Basquiat is the toast of the New York art scene, and even becomes a close friend of Andy Warhol (David Bowie). But Basquiat's success changes him very little -- an unfortunate situation, since he is a drug addict haunted by his institutionalized mother (Hope Clarke).
BASQUIAT is a film full of vibrant characters, none more so than Jean-Michel Basquiat himself. Jeffrey Wright, a Tony Award-winning stage actor, gives a stunning performance as Basquiat, a lonely wraith who always seems to be hovering just on the edge of coherence. Schnabel portrays him as a man who doesn't know how unhappy he is until he realizes that fame isn't making him any happier, that it has changed nothing. There is a series of wonderful scenes in which Basquiat, already a force in the art world, is treated as just another black man to be viewed with suspicion; in the best of them, he defiantly buys lunch for an entire table of white businessmen. But Schnabel also manages to show how absurdly easy art came to Basquiat. Indeed, when he is creating is the only time he does not seem to be suffering. Schnabel's direction and Wright's wrenching work present a sad man whose brilliance can't save him.
It is also impressive that Schnabel is savvy and confident enough to acknowledge the flaws of his own milieu, and the perceptions of the general public towards that milieu. BASQUIAT opens with a quote from Ricard about the art world's paranoia about overlooking The Next Big Thing: "Nobody wants to miss the Van Gogh boat." The battle to represent Basquiat is sometimes presented in melodramatic terms, with the artist forgetting the little people as he hits the big time, but Schnabel doesn't gloss over the cult of personality of the art world. He adds the year's second superb portrayal of Andy Warhol, with David Bowie perhaps providing even more clever detachment than Jared Harris's work in I SHOT ANDY WARHOL. Watch also for a marvelous scene in which Christopher Walken plays a journalist interviewing Basquiat, trying to bait him with subtle jabs at abstract modern art; he speaks for everyone convinced that art is an elaborate con.
There are a few clumsy moments in the structure of BASQUIAT, notably the presentation of his relationship with another aspiring artist (Claire Forlani), and the first half of the film is rather sluggishly paced. Still, for a newcomer to film, Julian Schnabel is remarkably assured. He knows his subject, and he knows the story he wants to tell. BASQUIAT is not about art as torture. It is about creation as escape, and Schnabel captures the vision of a tragic genius while refusing to diminish his life with as simplistic an epithet as "tortured artist."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 tortured artists: 8.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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