Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

XoWizIama Excellent adaptation.

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

TxMike I managed to watch this movie at home on DVD from my public library. My wife watched the trailer and decided it was not her type of movie.There are a number of very negative reviews and I can understand why. Not a lot happens, it is basically a glimpse of a few days in the life and work habits of Alberto Giacometti, played admirably by Geoffrey Rush. A movie fan not interested in this sort of glimpse probably should not take the time to see it.I went into my viewing completely ignorant of the artist. If the depiction here is faithful, and I believe it is considering the writer/director, the artist was quite an unusual person.The story focuses on what is the last painting the artist did in 1964, just a couple of years before his death. Armie Hammer plays his good friend, American James Lord, who was visiting the artist in Paris. Lord is asked to sit for a portrait before he leaves, the artist saying just an afternoon, maybe 3 or 4 hours. That sitting turned into an 18 day process.Whether one likes or appreciates the work of the artist is immaterial, this movie is a very good glimpse at the life of a very unusual man.

maurice yacowar Like most films about an artist, this is about (i) this artist and (ii) The Artist. This artist is the brilliant Swiss/Italian painter/sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Among the several borders he straddles in his work is mankind/existence. His characteristic image - whether in litho, painting or sculpture - is of an impossibly emaciated being, elongated into a teetering vulnerability. His figurative skeletons barely sustain their fragile presence in the antipathetic universe. But they stolidly strive on, with a burning eye or an assertive stride. Yet they barely impinge on their space. That encapsulates postwar European existentialism. The figures are not thin from dieting or starvation but from having been buffeted down and encased by the strictures of human existence. The film recreates Giacometti's studio which teems with recreations of his work. One large white head, bulkier than his typical, looms like a judgment as the characters engage around it and as the artist continually tinkers with his other pieces. Art big, a life small, that one silently asserts. With very little in the way of plot, action, even events, the film's focus is on characterizing Giacometti. The drama his subject James Lord records is Giacometti's insatiable dissatisfaction with his own work. The portrait that should take a day or two stretches into weeks as the artist finds one sense of failure after another, continually whiting over his work to begin anew. What anyone else might deem a success in form and expression, he dismisses because it doesn't achieve his non-apprehensible ideal. A nut bar, obviously, aka Artist. To appease the artist, Lord again and again postpones his flight to New York, even at the risk of the relationship he is compromising by his delays. This Giacometti lives large, everything with a flourish, from his assertive shabbiness to his exaggerated "depositing" of his money. The paradox is that the artist is so effusive in his life but makes such sucked-in, suppressed, creatures in his art. In life he flaunts the obtrusive self, while his art reflects our existential limitations. The two visions respond to each other. Even as he prepares to do a new work or as he rushes out to a bar or a walk, he can't help stopping to do a quick improvement on another piece. And he can never be certain it's an improvement. For its very committing is human, and his own, so necessarily imperfect. Perhaps that's why his every intense day of living is shadowed by the urge to suicide. If only it didn't happen just once.... If only you could repeat it, to improve it.... His quest for that subjective perfection means he can never be satisfied. It also means he keeps growing, changing and taking more risks and achieving greater art. Because he can't be satisfied by his work or by himself, here he trades some of his current more valuable drawings for some earlier - less fashionable, less valuable - works, because he wants to recover something of his old, lost self. The gray old man finds his illusion of romance as fugitive as the vision he pursues in his art - and even more expensive. Hence his absurd overpayment of his mistress's pimps when they come to renegotiate their contract. He raises the price they ask and insists on giving them a large wad to cover the last six months and a larger one for the next. In sex as in art he staves off his mortality. That's living large when you feel human life is so small. For all this individualizing of Giacometti, the film also exercises the modern stereotype of the bohemian artist. Giacometti lives that flamboyance, overriding conventions of art, morality, marriage, social niceties, in compulsive assertion of his self. This is the modern romantic vision of the - of course, necessarily Male - artist. Typically, we get the artist's habitual abuse of his wife, whom he exploits, insults, betrays. Yet he lavishly spoils his mistress, buying her a sports car, and suffers her neglect without a word. You don't have to be of the Me, Too generation to be offended by this. But it helps. He knows the other major artists of his day, of course, but in his own mind and conversation jockeys through gossip to maintain his superiority. An artist needs an ego. How else could he dare to be original? On this theme the film establishes a pointed contrast between Alberto and his artist/designer brother Diego. (Of the lesser known brother Bruno we hear nothing.) Diego has the requisite sensitivity and imagination. He makes a beautiful bird but ruefully acknowledges "It can't fly." But in contrast to Alberto's standard-issue flamboyance, Diego is the quiet, self-effacing worker. He dresses in a shop manager's smock. Instead of the sweeping gesture or challenging extremity, Diego quietly fiddles with things, turning out stuff of value and beauty without any major claims for it. He also avoids Alberto's emotional extremes, indulgences and engagements. Diego's quiet persistence contrasts to Alberto's exuberance. There are other kinds of artist than the stereotype. But it's the Alberto that brings to our much later attention the Diego.

JEF7REY HILDNER (StoryArchitect) My Silver Knight Riff1. I think a lot of people, especially artists, will enjoy this movie, even though it's kind of slow. Kind of like watching paint dry.Ouch. Sorry. Does that sound unfair? Too harsh? Well, maybe, but don't get me wrong. I really like the movie. I like slow. I like watching paint dry. I'm a painter. And so this movie speaks to me. I admire it. I admire Alberto Giacometti, whose life and mind I didn't know a whole lot about. I admire the screenwriter and set designer and all other facets of this refined 1h 31m movie--a terrific example of the Jean-Luc Godard concept that a movie is "the world in an hour and a half."In all kinds of satisfying ways, FINAL PORTRAIT paints a compelling portrait of Art.2. But I'm just being honest with you. Because when I went to see FINAL PORTRAIT the other night at the 1938 Art Moderne architectural gem the Tower Theater here in Sacramento, California, that thought, "like watching paint dry," flashed through my mind 1/2 way through the movie.A movie about a painter and painting and paint.So in a way, you can't help yourself having this thought, right? But it interrupted my concentration. I was sitting there in the theater as focused on the screen as Giacometti on his canvas. The film hooked me. But my mind wandered. Which broke the spell.Why?Because as this moment signified, when you get right down to it, the story design of FINAL PORTRAIT lacks the multi-dimensional development and depth that produces a sustained and irresistible emotional response. 3. I wanted more from FINAL PORTRAIT than intellectual appreciation. I wanted to feel and experience what I'm always hoping a movie will deliver--what all types of art will deliver, but especially a movie: what Robert McKee calls "aesthetic emotion" . . . and what the ancient Greeks called catharsis. Related concepts, but not the same.And when I watch a movie, I can't help yielding to the upwelling of these two magical forces any more than Jude Law's leaky-faucet character, Graham, can avoid tearing up in THE HOLIDAY. But FINAL PORTRAIT didn't trigger in me these emotions. I went into the theater hoping to come out like Jude Law's Graham. But I exited the theater like Cameron Diaz's Amanda. Dry eyed. 4. FINAL PORTRAIT didn't affect me the way I expect a great story exceptionally well told to affect me. But FINAL PORTRAIT is a treat for our eyes, ears, and soul. And it is most definitely a good story well told. And the movie takes me back 25 years ago to memories of seeing 32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD. (24 Short Films About Glenn Gould for my mom, because she entered the theater late and missed 1/4 of the film.) Makes me want to see both movies again. The pianist and the painter.And for 25 years, I've been breathing in Glenn Gould's artistic spirit and intellectual temperament, and to at least some degree they've infiltrated my being. I already feel the same thing happening because of FINAL PORTRAIT's rendering of Alberto Giacometti.I'll take what I saw and learned from the filmmakers' portrayal of him and their portrayal of art back to my studio to paint and repaint a new portrait of myself.For years to come.5. A few quick notes about the actors. Armie Hammer, in the role of James Lord, the American writer who narrates the movie and the model for Giacometti's final portrait, strikes an appealing pose in his reserved way as he did even more so in one of last year's most exquisite films, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, for which James Ivory (at 89) so deservingly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.And Geoffrey Rush . . . well, such a wonderful actor . . . what an engaging and compelling portrait of Alberto . . . his spirit . . . heart . . . mind . . . . His face molded by the filmmakers into a likeness of one of Giacometti's sculptures . . . his physicality makeupped and dressed to reflect the gray of his paintings. What a gift for Rush to play such a role. And he gives us the gift of his art in return.Tony Shalhoub portrays Alberto's faithful gatekeeper-brother Diego so well too. Understated and nuanced. And Annette (Sylvie Testud) and Caroline (Clemence Poesy) also well written, cast, and rendered too. Pretty much not a wrong note by the artists of the cast and the artists who comprise the filmmaking team.6. We get lines that educate and entertain about Giacometti himself, his artistic process and exacting patient search, and other artists about whom Giacometti has fascinating things to say, succinctly honoring Cézanne, nothing surprising revealed there, but slamming Picasso, way surprising. And even James weighs in about Dora Maar and Cézanne's wife in witty lines of exposition and observation.I also liked the brief scene of Alberto doing coffee with actor James Faulkner's Matisse--a surrealist twist given that Matisse died in 1954, 10 years before the time of the movie. So Giacometti liked Cézanne and Matisse, but not Picasso? That's OK with me--Cézanne and Matisse are the two kings on the chessboard of modern painting. Picasso himself knew that. But disappointing to learn that Giacometti undervalues the importance of Picasso and Braque and Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. Especially when Giacometti's sculptures and paintings reflect their influence.7. I guess the deepest most lasting impression for me--if I were to fast forward 25 years to what I might then look back and recall--will likely prove to be the pleasing feature that struck me right off the bat: the muted, gray color palette of a movie about the artist called the "Grey One." The filmmakers paint the look and feel of Giacometti's World in tones of gray, warm and cool. A World, an Arena, that includes his Studio . . . and his Home . . . and the Courtyard that connects them--the Space between that unifies the turbulent angst of Giacometti's somber intense melancholy gray world of Work and Love.Freud said those are the two basic human needs. The two that most people need fulfilled to feel happy. Work and Love.FINAL PORTRAIT gets that.8. We see the twilight struggle of Alberto's Inner World at the end of his life given poetic expression through the gray portrait of the artist's Outer World. A world of light and shadow and hazy windows and mirrors and broken glass . . . quasi reflections of emotional truth and complex gray human relationships . . . reinforced through the subtext of Giacometti's compressed and mid-toned work-and-love venue where the unfolding of the drama of his life takes place.I believe that architecture is the stage set for the drama of life--the drama of life and death. The world in a building. The filmmakers of FINAL PORTRAIT are in touch with these concepts.9. The set design of Giacometti's studio features sculptures ranging in size from XL to XS. We see variants of Giacometti's trademark sculptures: stick-like, elongated, vertically distorted--an echo of El Greco. But we also see more classically volumetric studies, including an XL sculpted head that Giacometti especially adores. A self-portrait? Probably. Like all of his work. And this particular sculpture of an XL face helps us grasp Giacometti's brave eccentricity and obsession with the plasticity and rugged terrain of the human head. Sculpted and molded by the artist's hands as if by God from the clay of the earth--but sculpted true to Cézanne's view of the world as formed essentially by geometric primaries: cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres. We get the feeling that all of these sculptures are Giacometti's best friends. Expressions of his zest, life force, and love. And through the art of film, we view Giacometti in a studio where sculptures of people interact visually and symbolically with flesh-and-blood human beings, all in a crowded sacred space that runs on the psychological energy and physical work of the artist and on the fuel of the tense interplay of the artist's and his models' minds and emotions--from buoyant Caroline, Alberto's prostitute girlfriend, so eager for him to paint her portrait . . . to low key James who's honored to sit for the artist but can't wait to leave Paris and get back to New York . . . to agonized Annette, the wife, distraught but steadfast and accepting.10. FINAL PORTRAIT presents the layered emotional choreography of this odd ensemble of souls, united by Alberto Giacometti's fiery passion, on a stage set of life where the artist isn't the typical starving artist. Just the opposite. Giacometti is so successful selling his art that he has money to burn. But he doesn't care. Because he knows that money can't buy him the one thing he really wants--what all artists worth their soul really want:Truth.11. I didn't know anything about this movie before it started. Zero. Only the title. Just the way I like it. So I had no idea it was about Giacometti. Or who was cast in the roles of a screenplay I didn't know who wrote. So the credits at the end revealed the beautiful surprise. Wow. Way to go Stanley Tucci. Director and Writer. Thanks to James Lord and your sensitive adaption of his memoir "A Giacometti Portrait," you've painted the canvas of the silver screen with beautiful brush strokes, evoking in me associations with James Joyce through your Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man.My Silver Knight Rating of FINAL PORTRAIT:White Knight (Form): 8.0Black Knight (Story): 7.0=Silver Knight (Form & Story): 7.57.5 CamerasThe Silver Knight Rating scores a movie's level of play in what I call the Chess Game of Art. (See my IMDb commentary on ARRIVAL.)

BasicLogic Do you really need a model? Some modern art forms and the artists who created them were just so weird. Talents, inspiration, Muse, writer block, painter block, sculptor block....the ways or the twisted ways to look at an object, a dead unmovable thing or a lively human being....Well, you just moved. No, I didn't. Yes, you did....Oh, F@ck! I can't go on, let's do it tomorrow. Okay? Tomorrow would be better. Where should I hide the money? Under the bed? On the beam? You are taller, you do it....No, I can still see it, take it down....Adulteries is the privileged entitlement of an artist, already famous or still struggle to survive. Being abnormal is something great artists usual got, but not autism, yeah?On and on, the questionable obsession of being a model to be painted by a well known artist is just too absurd. But Geoffrey Rush is definitely one of the greatest actors ever be on the screen, a rare treasure that's for sure. "Shine 1996" and "The Best Offer 2013" are the two most memorable films to me. But this film is not what I can swallow easily, what I saw in this film is a troubled mind and soul, very unstable, most of the time just looked like a walking dead, even a mixture of pyscohpath and sociopath, a person with split characters. Do I really want know more about this guy. NO.