Basquiat, page 2
In the first and best half of the film, Schnabel carefully sets up Basquiat's playful spirit and innate ambition. As played by "Angels in America" star Jeffrey Wright, he's a passive-aggressive operator who bops around, quietly tagging brick walls with non-sequitur graffiti and acting like a precocious but inarticulate art student. He fingerpaints in pancake syrup at a diner as he flirts with the waitress, the radiant Claire Forlani, who soon becomes his ill-treated girlfriend. Basquiat behaves badly toward everyone, but as he loses friends, the film's great and credible painting scenes, set in the artist's basement studio, make him a sympathetic figure. After Basquiat's first major gallery success, the film fast-forwards to his decline, a period which finds the artist alienated, drug addled and increasingly embittered by art world racism. This is the era that Schnabel apparently feels most connected to, for it's here that he visually enters the picture. Large Warhol-style portraits of the painter/director lean against the wall in one pivotal scene, and linger in the frame far longer than any Hitchcock walk-on. Schnabel also appears in the thinly veiled guise of artist Albert Milo, played by Gary Oldman. Milo is the film's voice of artistic reason, inhabiting a palazzo-size loft and studio where he is loving father to a cherubic child (played by Schnabel's own daughter) and father figure to Basquiat as well. In the background, a procession of assistants arranges a exhibition of movie-screen-sized Schnabel paintings. These self-aggrandizing sequences slow down the movie's narrative and leave one wondering how much of this "true story" is fantasy after all. Though the second half of "Basquiat" is far less successful, Schnabel manages to hold our attention with clean, artful camerawork and unexpected actors playing real-life art dealers, artists, curators and nightclubbers. These characters are all the more fascinating since they reveal Schnabel's opinions of his associates. Dennis Hopper portrays dealer Bruno Bischofberger as a stately neurotic, while a toothy Parker Posey is a dead ringer for bitchy Mary Boone (whose gallery Schnabel left to get away from "the art crowd" in 1984). Critic Rene Ricard (Michael Wincott), one of the first champions of Basquiat's work, comes across as a loose-cannon homosexual who throws a hissy fit at a gallery dinner. Courtney Love, a commanding presence with her misshapen face, breezes through a couple of scenes as one of Basquiat's cheap dates. David Bowie's Andy Warhol is shockingly off kilter at first. We're clearly looking at Bowie in a bad silver wig (borrowed from the Warhol Museum), aping Andy with errant traces of a British accent seeping through. Initially he delivers his lines tilting his head like a glazed Valley Girl, but as his relationship with Basquiat develops, Bowie's Warhol becomes a more believable character, rather like a sadsack version of Quentin Crisp. The Basquiat and Warhol scenes generate some good dramatic interplay, but they're more about superficial male bonding than art. When the pair work collaboratively, they're both in their own worlds, incapable of really understanding each other. "You keep crossing all my parts out," Warhol whines. After Warhol dies, Schnabel indulges in a long, sappy scene of a teary, shirtless Basquiat wallowing in shot-on-video memories of his dead friend. Schnabel truly seems to care about his fellow artists. Unfortunately, his dialogue often renders them blank and inarticulate. Although Schnabel celebrates the physical creative process, at the same time he seems to question the intelligence of his colleagues. It's almost as if Schnabel wants us to think that being an art star doesn't take brains, just stamina. The smart artists, he obviously believes, are heading for Hollywood.
Glen Helfand is an art curator and critic in San Francisco.
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