Good morning.
When I was a tender art student back at the turn of the century, one particular class sticks out in my mind. We were shown a creaky documentary about American painter Jackson Pollock, in which talking heads of the art world gushed about his dynamic painting technique and genius usage of fractals. I remember gazing, mesmerized, at the grainy footage of the Abstract Expressionist casually drizzling his paint over an oversize canvas, and I thought to myself:
“This guy is full of shit”.
So I picked up some “blind buys” during Barnes and Noble’s recent Criterion Collection 50% off sale, and one of them was Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996). It had one hell of a cast – David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Benicio del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken – but what I wasn’t expecting was how fucking funny it would turn out to be.
I knew I was in for a ride even as the opening credits rolled. Fairytale of New York by the Pogues over ponderous footage of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat and his mother viewing Picasso’s Guernica within the bleakest art gallery in existence.
His mother weeps at the majestic tragedy of war before looking down at her son and, I shit you not, this kid has a literal glowing crown of glory on his head. His mother smiles beatifically.
So we skip to the late Seventies, the kid is grown up now and played by Jeffery Wright in his film debut. He spends his days tagging buildings with nonsense aphorisms, doing drugs, and hallucinating 50’s surfing stock footage at the sky, and his nights sleeping in a cardboard box. I think Eddie Vedder wrote Evenflow with this guy in mind.
He wanders into a coffee shop and, after depositing the entire contents of a syrup dispenser on his table, proceeds to finger-paint. This apparently charms the (literal) pants off the waitress, played by a fresh-from-Mallrats Claire Forlani (you may also remember her from Mystery Men, in which she plays a waitress), who apparently sees his genius as an artist.
She and his best friend Benicio del Toro help nurture his talent, and before long, he’s repeatedly “discovered” by luminaries of the 1980’s New York art scene of increasing pedigree and self-importance.
What follows are your typical biopic beats, as Jean-Michel rises to the pinnacle of fame and success, making phony friends and ditching his real ones, taking more and more drugs, and generally getting high on his own supply. I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s face it, you either know what happened to him, or you don’t care.
Performances are excellent across the board, with one-scene tour-de-force performances by Walken and Dafoe. Lots of “That Guy” moments. Bowie is clearly having a ball playing Andy Warhol, but the standout was Michael Wincott as over-the-top art critic Rene Ricard, whose performance, despite its theatricality, feels singularly human among the narcissistic golems of the art world.
Director Julian Schnabel, also a painter and contemporary of Basquiat’s, brings a palpable sense of time and place for the era, along with a healthy dose of absurdism. I mentioned before how funny this movie is. It’s very possible that the filmmakers intended to make a deep, philosophical journey into the psyche of a doomed genius artist. It’s also possible that Schnabel et al are taking the piss.
What I’m trying to say is there is a lot of pissing in this movie. Warhol hires a guy to consume mass quantities of beer and then piss on canvas for him (he would do it himself, but he hates beer). Basquiat takes a piss in Gary Oldman’s stairwell. It’s gotta be some sort of metaphor about sheer emptiness and absurdity of the modern art world.
The biographical Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Artist as a story template is about as played out as the Hero’s Journey, and it’s as if Schnabel and Wright realize this, mainly from how utterly stupid everything is. Imagine if Cuba Gooding Jr. from Radio painted infantile grotesques instead of gurning at high school cheerleaders, and then imagine every vacuous art snob in SoHo heralding it as the Second Coming.
As I watched, I began to wonder if Schnabel secretly hated Basquiat. Is he Salieri? Is it the art world at large that he despises? Or is this exclusive universe he portrays, with its drugged-up, soft-brained caricatures of the creative elite, so fundamentally accurate that it simply comes off as satire?
At the conclusion of the film, after all its ostensibly overwrought attempts to make us feel an inkling of sympathy for the tortured, misunderstood prodigy, we’re treated to a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah over the closing credits. I shit you not.
Have a good day.
