Post 3

Ashley Green

Julian Schnabel’s film, Basquiat, is a didactic muddle that feels too clinical to really leave a lasting effect and too murky to even offer a real message. While well acted, especially on the part of Jeffery Wright who fully embodies the role, the poor dialogue and clichéd shot compositions leaves much to be desired in Schnabel’s first feature. But the ambitious scope of the film in itself is merit worthy, I guess. Schnabel plays double duty, as both the writer and the director, which opens him open to double the criticism. He tries to reconstruct a period in the life of a good friend, but he never seems to have enough of a grasp on the heart his characters to really make them come alive. And in this film that’s exactly what nearly every real life individual becomes- a character.

The film opens with a slow zoom-in on Picasso’s Guernica. As the camera zooms closer, a mother and a son come into focus. While the mother holds a somber expression on her face, the young boy is clearly in awe of the sight in front of him. His mother’s expression morphs into one of tearful happiness as she observes his glowing crown. The young boy is a king, and this is enough to bring joy to her. Then a quick cut to a box popping open occurs- a head of dreadlocked hair pops out of said box. The cut itself indicates the previous scene was a dream, and the music only continues to confirm this. A jaunty urban tune fills the scene, supporting the city scene the young man is walking through. He starts to mark up walls with graffiti at random, leaving messages of his very existence: “Samo was here.” He continues to move coolly with through the streets until he reaches a diner. As he enters, he makes eye contact with a beautiful young woman. Once he sits down, he proceeds to poor syrup onto the table and create and impromptu sketch of the woman. This is essentially the first ten minutes of the movie, and sans the very opening scene, I don’t think I could have been more bored. Anytime you can take a city as multi-faceted as New York, an actor as talented as Jeffery Wright, and then proceed to turn it in to nothing more than a dull exercise in camera movement. Now, I do believe the opening scene is worth analysis, but I’m going to reserve my thoughts on it until later in the analysis.

The film continues in this same vein for the next few minutes. There are all the proper indicators of Basquiat’s true genius: Basquiat looking in the sky and seeing a surfer, special musical queues when he begins to work, and a “moment of greatness” scene when he creates mass amounts of brilliant work. And throughout all of this, the film maintains its mundane nature. Basquiat’s mental ills also begin to fall into light- he’s a drug addict. The problem is the film never seems to really posit this as a crippling problem for him; in fact it almost refuses to make an issue out of it at all. Schnabel appears to be so concerned with not passing judgment on Basquiat that he refuses to take any type of true intellectual or artistic stance, which is normally one of the offerings of a biopic- perspective.

Probably the most worthwhile moments of the film are the reoccurring motifs, particularly dealing with Hawaii and surfing, and also dealing with the crown, creativity, and beauty. The first indicator of the Hawaii motif occurs when Basquait looks into the sky about 6 minutes into the film and sees a surfer riding a sky of blue. The shot itself is rather magnificent, as the waves of blue juxtapose the tops of city building, and it is probably the films best offering cinematography wise. The motif continues to occur as Basquiat discusses living in Hawaii with his friends and it comes to a head when his life seems to be at his most difficult. The surfer in the sky falls off his board and is lost in the wave, representing both a loss of control, a loss of perspective, and in some ways, the lost of a dream for Basquait. Because that is ultimately what Hawaii is to Basquait, a dream existence that, no matter how much money he makes, he can never spiritually afford.

The other prevalent motif that runs through the film is that of the crown. After it’s introduction in the opening scene, the crown continues to reappear, predominantly as a type of signature for Basquait’s “SAMO” alter-ego. The motif comes full circle in the end though when Basquait recounts a childhood story to his friend about a young crowned prince. The prince was captured and locked away in a tower, and everyday the prince would beat the crown across the bars in the hopes that someone would hear the sound and save him. No one saved him, but everybody heard the sound and thought it to be the most beautiful sound to ever reach their ears. The story itself appears to present a metaphor for Basquait’s life. His artwork is his crown, and he hopes that the people will see it and he will be saved. But though the people see it and admire the work as beautiful, they still do not appear to see Basquait the man, or they do not see him in the way he wants to be seen.

In the end, I still feel Schnabel creates too many critical errors to call Basquait as good film. First, he relies too much on the audience to fill in the blanks for Basquait’s behaviors and action; he also does the same in forcing the audience to make assumptions about Basquait’s life in general. He is simply too vague. He also relies to heavily on banal cinematography that makes the film feel elementary and tired. Maybe this is a negative assumption on my part, but I expect more from an artist. But for a first try, the film does hold some merit and is not wholly irredeemable.

A bit of a side-note: I found this article earlier today. It seems a Basquiat painting valued at around 8 million that went missing has been found. The link to the article is below:

Missing Basquiat art reappears in NYC