Loving Vincent (2017)

  This is an interesting film on many levels but it never quite gripped me emotionally.  I kept hoping it would but there was just something ineffable that I was missing.

A year after Vincent van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk) dies from a gunshot to the abdomen, a young man named Armand (Douglas Booth) is tasked with delivering Van Gogh's final letter to his brother, Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz).  Unfortunately, Theo has also died and Armand doesn't know to whom else to deliver the letter, wandering from Van Gogh's Parisian agent (John Sessions) to the home of the doctor (Jerome Flynn) who declared the painter mentally sound.  Along the way, Armand grows interested in Van Gogh's final days, suspecting that what befell was a tragic and entirely preventable accident rather than a suicide.

This is an intensely melancholy movie structured like a mystery that somehow just doesn't have any mystique.  Maybe because there's no point to Armand's investigation.  He's not bringing Van Gogh back from the dead or righting some cosmic wrong with his revelations.  In many ways, Armand's fact-finding only makes Van Gogh's story more tragic.  Which is a total downer.

The animation is unique because every frame was hand-painted in Van Gogh's signature style by over 100 artists.  That's an incredible undertaking if you sit down and think about it.  Unfortunately, that impressionistic style makes some of the action a little harder to make out but that also might be because I was watching it on a tablet at my parents' house rather than on a real screen.  Tyler didn't seem to have any problems so maybe it was just me.

This does deserve more love and more views, if for nothing else than the stunning achievement of animation.  It's streaming on Hulu right now if you're interested.