Schnabel, who was the biggest art star of the ’80s, is no stranger to the ambition and hype that surrounded Basquiat’s career. Yet in his debut as a director and screenwriter, he doesn’t address Basquiat’s place as an artist nor question whether art-world honchos helped nurture Jean Michel or just cashed in on him. What we get is a rambling, partly fictional account of Basquiat’s rise from street kid scrawling obscure epigrams on walls to lionized young painter in Yohji Yamamoto suits, buying caviar by the pound. Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) is self-destructive at every turn. There’s his constant drug use. But there’s also his rotten treatment of his early champions and his loyal girlfriend (movingly played by Claire Forlani).
Schnabel has assembled an incredibly cool cast – David Bowie as Andy Warhol, who became Basquiat’s mentor; Benicio del Toro as his best friend; Gary Oldman as a Schnabel clone. And there are some great cameos: Tatum O’Neal, as a collector in a pink Chanel suit, muses about buying one of Basquiat’s bold, expressionist paintings but wonders if she can live ““with all that green.’’ Christopher Walken is an oily TV interviewer who asks Basquiat if he considers himself ““a painter or a black painter?’’ Courtney Love is a natural as a party girl called Big Pink.
But Basquiat himself remains weirdly elusive. Wright (a Tony-award winner for ““Angels in America’’) brings vulnerability and charm to the role, but Schnabel’s script never fleshes out his character or analyzes his life. Despite some great scenes, the movie has no real momentum. And sometimes Schnabel lapses into inexplicable, pretentious symbols. (We’re still trying to figure out those medieval peasants.) Schnabel clearly means this as an affectionate trib- ute. (He even painted the copies of Bas- quiat’s work himself – and they’re very good fakes.) But this troubling story deserves more than good intentions.
title: “Portrait Of The Artist” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Michael Duggan”
Sher’s brilliant performance is an unforgettable portrait of the jockey-sized visionary artist who saw his Berkshire village of Cookham as an “earthly paradise”: in his paintings, he made it the scene of Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. Gems empathetically shows Spencer as an emotionally infantile genius who leaves his earthy wife, Hilda (Deborah Findley), for Patricia Preece (Anna Chancellor), a dilettante painter and lesbian. Both women are outstanding in John Caird’s vivid production. But it’s Sher who drives the play through the pitfalls of the biopic genre. It’s nearly impossible to play artistic genius, but he does it. In his conehead hat, thick glasses and baggy pants, trundling his materials in a child’s rickety pram, his Spencer is a latter-day Blake, lusting after the ectoplasm of angels and the flesh of women.
Part of Sher’s insight into Spencer comes from his own multiple talents. He is an excellent artist and a fine novelist and writer. And you’d expect Sher, a Jew and a gay man growing up in South Africa, to understand the nature of the outsider. But it wasn’t until he went to England at 19 to study acting that he realized the nature of the apartheid society. “My family was apolitical,” he says. “I was brought up being told these people are inferior; they’re the servants, you’re the masters. My father was a successful businessman and we were comfortable and unquestioning.” Then, in England in 1968, “I was shocked to realize what we were living in and doubly shocked that! was a Jew who had been living in that abhorrent system.” Ironically, while Sher didn’t see the horrors of apartheid, he had known that he was gay from the age of 4: “Growing up in Cape Town I thought I was the only gay person in the world.”
In England he rose from provincial theaters to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he played a Richard Ill that has become legendary. Having ruptured an Achilles’ tendon, he decided to play the evil Richard on crutches, scuttling around “like a bottled spider.” The diminutive, mild-mannered Sher gravitates toward horrific characters. He played a memorably homicidal “Titus Andronicus.” In 1995 he brought “Titus” to South Africa, in a production directed by Gregory Doran, his companion. He was “shocked” by the half-empty houses. They did the play in modern dress with South African accents, and “that only confused the audience,” says Sher. “Having missed out on world culture for so long they wanted Shakespeare in period costume with British accents.” The experience helped to dissuade him from his idea that he might return to South Africa to live: “In my first speech on a South African stage, Titus says that he’s come ’to re-salute his country with his tears’.” In this case the tears were real.
