The famous canvasses are omnipresent but usually left in the background, kept in Theo's salon or, strangely, subjected to repeated mutilation: smeared, thrown, smashed to demonstrate their (and the artist's) fragility. In the painting scenes, occasionally the image on the easel fails to match the landscape that Roth-as-van-Gogh is nominally depicting: in the first 1890 painting sequence, a row of trees disappears from the canvas in what appears to be either a gesture of either the artist's madness or the filmmaker's lack of interest.

Tellingly, the only real brushwork in the film is as background for the credits. Brushwork, of course, is where imagery -- the myth of the artist, the "vision" of subject matter -- meets the pragmatic realities of materials and technique. Altman captures the mud of materials and the marketplace alike, and provides a rich and allegorical subject, but I would have liked this film to have...
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