Robert Altman has often likened his working methods to that of a painter’s, the process coming off the cuff, from the gut, purely unconscious. But he’s had an artisan’s vocational upbringing into the movie business—only after years of crap jobs like selling insurance did he eventually learn his trade at the Calvin Company in Kansas City, makers of how-to and industrial films; and only after he plied it in a couple of feature obscurities (The James Dean Story, The Delinquents; both 1957) and about a hard decade in the mercenary grind of television, in which he was dependent on the fickle la-di-da benevolence of producers, sponsors, and ratings, did Altman’s filmic voice emerge through Countdown, That Cold Day in the Park and, finally, M*A*S*H.

It stands to reason, then, that he was not blessed with a fully-formed and focused Artist’s emergence out of the womb: he discovered—maybe stumbled ass-backwards over—his talent, and he sharpened it. No surprise that hokey mysticism like the Born Artiste, exalted above the peons, has zero call in Altman’s Democracy: his sense of that myth (or withering cynicism towards) demands that, say, Willie Hart’s visionary paintings in 3 Women be done in a pool at an apartment complex in Cow’s Ass, CA, and not hung on a wall in the Met; or that Tom Frank’s performance of his song “I’m Easy” in Nashville is less some kind of grandiose exaltation than one man’s simple groveling to get laid.

“I am a workman,” Vincent van Gogh (Tim Roth, some of Made in Britain‘s skinhead still in him) says in Vincent & Theo, “I am a painter.” This is Altman’s ground-level take on the man: Vincent may see God in Art, but the director still damns him to finances. Following video footage of a Van Gogh painting being auctioned at Christie’s in London, the narrative opens on a scene between Vincent and his brother Theo (Paul Rhys) in the former’s impoverished flophouse as impulsive Vincent makes the “Hey-what-the-hell?” decision to become a painter, and art gallery employee Theo informs his broke brother that he’s been floating his bills. All the while Altman ruthlessly undercuts this exchange by carrying over the banter of the auction underneath the dialogue, the irony getting pumped up as the bidding gets higher, putting the newfound artist’s life in a hardscrabble context. Here, without the romance of history, Vincent is merely a painter, “not bad” according to peer Paul Gauguin (Wladimir Yordanoff), and only a paid painter in that he gives his brother his work—which Theo peddles at the gallery and can’t sell—in exchange for his allowance. Any “genius” that exists does so only in the form of the amplified colors on his canvases, which Altman, cinematographer Jean Lépine, and production designer/progeny Stephen Altman, do well to not replicate cinematically.

Even a usual abstainer of cliché like Altman can’t resist imbibing in some of the ol’ irresistible “tortured artist” shtick: the framing and posture of Vincent lying on his bed in the first scene, saying he wants to be a painter, is strikingly duplicated later when Vincent lies in a bath at an asylum while a doctor haphazardly diagnoses him as basically loony (chronic case of lust for life, apparently).Vincent paints, drinks, paints, takes, paints, self-mutilates, paints, and finally dies by his own hand, paintings unsold, and with little true meaning to anyone except his brother. And maybe it’s Theo, as the brothers’ headstones are framed together at the end, who emerges as the figure of greater tragedy—hobbled by syphilis and guilt, he had the desire to be his own man but toiled as an underling at a gallery where he didn’t even make a married man’s wage. He loved Vincent as Vincent took from him cheerfully; until finally Theo willed himself into the sort of emotional isolation that Vincent was cursed/born with, voluntarily excluding himself from his wife and son; and still he loved Vincent and was finally alone with him a year after his brother’s death, following him to the grave.

Given the parallels in Altman/van Gogh’s approach to art, it’s tempting to read Vincent & Theo as a smuggled Altman autobio: like Vincent (Tim Roth), Altman dropped the church, although Vincent traded Christianity for painting and Altman probably just stopped giving a shit about Catholicism; Vincent’s penchant for trashing his work is approved by Altman in the featurette on the DVD, when he tells Tim Roth that he loves to “destroy paintings” (residue from his days in the slash ’n’ burn arena of industrial and TV?); Vincent’s contentious financial relationship with moneyman Theo could stand for any number of similar relationships feisty Altman’s had with agents, managers, producers, or studio heads; and just as Vincent claims that he can’t paint “from here” (pointing to his head), so does Altman work more clearly when he’s not coming from his own cranium (Images) but rather when he reacts to—and allows himself to be caught up in—the crowd (as in the likes of California Split, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, or The Company).

But Altman is not Vincent, finally, or at least cannot invest in him. He may track and film his actors the way Vincent tracks and draws the prostitute Sien (Jip Wijngaarden), he may pan and zoom through a field of sunflowers in the manner of cunning brushstrokes, but his earthbound populism paradoxically demands an overlord’s omniscient view of the recycling process of life and death, and it’s such that Vincent’s bedridden death with Theo at his side doesn’t even occur on camera—he’s alive, the camera pans off him and follows Theo’s arm as he reaches over and past him, the camera comes back with the arm, to him, and he’s dead. He cannot grant the artist, one man, a symbolic/metaphoric passing. Ultimately what matters most to Altman is the societal ebb and flow, and the aftereffects and absorption of shock, and if Altman grieves for Vincent, it’s because Theo does.

Vincent & Theo makes its Region One debut courtesy of MGM and, like other MGM Altman releases Fool for Love, The Long Goodbye, Images; (where’s Thieves Like Us, fellas?), it comes with a specially produced featurette, this one called “Film as Fine Art,” running about 25 minutes and featuring new interviews with the two Altmans, along with snippets of footage shot on the set and bits of archival interviews with Roth and Rhys. Kind of a misleading title, but there’s a good amount of standard behind-the-scenes info to be gleaned (about as much as there can be from Altman, who tends to speak in generalized philosophy when it comes to shop talk), such as the project’s genesis as a miniseries for British TV. The elder Altman speaks of footage shot and then discarded as the miniseries morphed into a feature—man, where’s that stuff—and a not-idiotic trailer rounds out the disc.
—ANDY STARK