Starry Night (1999)

Film review #707

Director: Paul Davids

SYNOPSIS: Artist Vincent Van Gogh meets a strange woman who offers him a magic potion that she says will resurrect him over one hundred years after his death. Sure enough, he comes back to life in 1999 to find his artworks that, having been forgotten in his lifetime, were now valuable and world-famous. He starts stealing his own artworks from the collectors that have purchased them, claiming they belong to him, and leading him to having to prove he is the real Vincent Van Gogh.

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Starry Night is a 1999 film based around the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. The opens up with Van Gogh being visited by a strange woman who gives him a potion that apparently will bring him back to life about a hundred years after he dies. Who she is, why she has such a potion, why it takes about a hundred years to come to back to life; none of this is explained any further. We cut to a grave of Van Gogh, and next, a present day parade with Van Gogh wandering around lost. Again, no detail given to how he managed to resurrect himself and get there. This is an ongoing issue with this film, in that the scenes are very disjointed and often implausible how one gets from one scene to the next. This continues when Van Gogh ends up in hospital next to a lawyer from Los Angeles, and next scene, he ends up in L.A. There’s no conceivable way Van Gogh would be able to travel from the Netherlands to the U.S.; he’s not exactly going to have a passport is he? There’s a bit of the typical fish-out-of-water scenario as Van Gogh tries to adjust to the present day (of 1999), but there’s not a lot. The story instead is focused on the plot of Van Gogh learning about how valuable his artwork has become, sets out to steal his artwork from the rich collector’s that have brought them, and attempting to prove that he is who he says he is, and they are his property. Again, how he is able to constantly break into mansions, evade modern security systems and steal highly valuable artwork is never really explained.

The purpose of this film is, it seems, to be a more positive, feel-good film, providing a “happy ending” for Van Gogh of sorts: while he was largely forgotten and unsuccessful in life, this film aims to show the artist that his work would find fame and acceptance. The specifics of that, as mentioned, are very light on details, and the story lacks any real direction, hobbling along with a barebones romance and minor disputes to support it. The very low budget doesn’t allow for anything of real interest to happen, and locations are very limited or obvious greenscreens. The acting is also very poor: David Abbot as Van Gogh barely conveys anything interesting or emotionally engaging, and his attempt at a Dutch accent constantly wanders into Irish, which is very silly. The rest of the cast too, fail to generate anything noteworthy. While I appreciate there’s some heart in this film to give Van Gogh’s life a happy ending, there’s no effort to make a cohesive story or film in general, skipping over important details, having no direction, and flat performances that make the film irrevocably dull. There’s plenty of better films about van Gogh out there.