Vincent and Theo

The final film made by Robert Altman during his decade of de facto banishment from Hollywood before his triumphant return with The Player is a masterpiece about a maker of masterpieces. Vincent and Theo focuses Altman’s unique and distinctive style on Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, finding something close to home in the irony between the painter’s appreciation of nature and life and the economic riches his paintings now bring compared to his failure to sell a canvas during his lifetime.

“Under the hot breath of the mistral, a field of sunflowers like faceless lions dance, a thousand golden Salomes to drive the painter beyond passion to a storied madness. A glorious dazzle, they entice poor Vincent as a lover never would. Altman brings an artist’s eye and suffering spirit to his masterly portrait of Vincent and Theo. This lovely if deliberate film marks Altman’s return to a more straightforward, but by no means expected, style. A biography that plays like fiction, it tells the story of the van Gogh brothers, stroked and brushed and globbed onto the canvas of the screen. Altman gives us art as ordered chaos, and inspiration as a merciless muse….A triumph for the two young British stage actors, Tim Roth and Paul Rhys, who play the artist and his art dealer brother.…Vincent and Theo is more than art appreciation, it is a treasure in its own right, unframed and arcing in the projector’s light.”—Rita Kempley, Washington Post.

(PG-13, 138 min., 1990)

Sponsored by Colby College Cinema Studies

Tickets: $9 for adults, $5 for students