Loving Vincent (2017)

Loving Vincent is a beautiful movie, obviously made with a tremendous amount of love—for Vincent van Gogh, for the craft of painting, and for modern art more broadly. However, as a feature-length film, it turns out that it’s kind of hard to look at that type of painting, in that specific style, for that long.

Which means it really behooves us to talk about how this movie was made. At its core, Loving Vincent is a love letter to van Gogh from its directors and writers. It began as a series of small experimental pieces, kick-started through internet donations, and was eventually funded by arts organizations to become a full feature-length film.

One of the film’s coolest achievements is how it brings together characters and scenes from van Gogh’s paintings and recreates them within a single cinematic world. Seeing these familiar images re-contextualized and animated is a remarkable technical feat. The problem is: you don’t really learn any of this from the movie itself. You learn it from the behind-the-scenes YouTube videos you watch afterward.

Honestly, that’s something I maybe should have watched before seeing the film.

I went in knowing very little—basically that it seemed like Waking Life, but with paintings, and about Vincent van Gogh. And while that description is basically correct, I didn’t have the full backstory. As a result, my experience while watching often amounted to a vague sense of recognition: Oh, I’ve seen that painting before. Did they intend that? The answer, of course, is yes—100%.

Unlike most movies, where this kind of contextual knowledge is best delivered after the fact, I think Loving Vincent actually would have benefited from having that context upfront. Knowing what I know now would have made the experience much more powerful.

That said, this exposes a real issue. Movies should generally stand on their own. You shouldn’t need to watch bonus features to fully understand what you’re seeing. When George Lucas says the prequels “rhyme” with the original trilogy, you already know that—you don’t need a DVD extra to explain it. But with Loving Vincent, you kind of do need the DVD extras to grasp 100% of what’s going on. And that’s a flaw.

This ties into my biggest issue with the film, which is common to a lot of rotoscoped or heavily stylized works: the style becomes draining. Especially with postmodern art, your brain is constantly trying to anticipate what it’s going to see next. Sometimes it can. Sometimes it can’t. And often, it can’t do so quickly or effortlessly enough for the experience to feel smooth.

This is how I think about certain Kendrick Lamar albums. Some of his music is incredible—but only when I’m fully focused, eyes closed, actively listening. I’m not putting it on as background music. By contrast, I might listen to Drake while doing a task that doesn’t require much cognitive attention, just to keep the vibe up. I’m not doing that with Kendrick.

This movie has the same split. It demands focus. It’s not easy watching. You have to work at it.

Do I regret watching it? No. There’s real value in bearing witness to the artistry—both van Gogh’s and that of the hundreds of people who labored over this film. But I do think the short experimental clips that preceded the movie were probably enough. We get the idea.

I’d only recommend watching Loving Vincent if you’re intentionally setting aside time for a deeply artistic evening—and you’re ready to meet it on its own demanding terms.