Final Portrait (15)
★★
“HAVE you always been like this, so doubtful of your own ability?” asks American writer James Lord (Armie Hammer) as he sits still to be painted. “Oh of course, it gets worse every year,” replies Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush).
“But you become more successful every year,” remarks Lord, who would actually go on to be the artist’s biographer. “What better breeding ground for doubt than success?” Alberto retorts.
This in a nutshell is the relationship between these two men, the difficult and singular mid-20th century artist Giacometti and his newfound American subject who agrees to be painted for a few days, not realising this means an overly extended stay in Paris due to the artist’s penchant for redoing his work basically from scratch because of his own perceived mediocrity.
The inimitable Rush shows his talent for imitation, convincingly inhabiting the persona of Giacometti so that we feel like we’re really watching this small period of his life unfold. His fidgety, charmingly quirky performance creates a believable portrait of a man who seemed to enjoy liquor-fuelled socialising rather than his actual work itself and was content, as his brother Diego (Tony Shalhoub) states, to be “perfectly unsatisfied”.
He is brazen with his relationship with prostitute Caroline (a sparky Clémence Poésy) and casually forthright in how he conducts himself in conversation; one of the first things he says to Lord as he sits him down as his artistic subject is how he has “the head of a brute”. Really, what’s he supposed to say to that?
Hammer is the chalk to his cheese, his sharp suit and logical view of the world standing in stark contrast to Giacometti’s erratic behaviour and suspicions, the two of them playfully sparring in conversations in between brush strokes and casual drinks.
So why, then, isn’t it more involving? Stanley Tucci’s fifth directorial offering, and first since 2007’s romantic dramedy Blind Date, plays more like a down-the-line look into the past and one with more than a touch of built-in repetitiveness and frustrating lack of closure about it.
On an aesthetic level it has a greyed and rather washed-out visual palette – mostly within the confines of Alberto’s messy studio – that renders it a curiously drab film to behold.
While the two lead performances make the yin and yang character clashing somewhat engaging, the direction lacks the kind of inventive spark to make the drama leap off the screen, the supposed brilliance of Giacometti’s work is never truly conveyed and it never really conjures that all-important transportive 1960s Parisian quality that the tale demands.
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