ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 16, 1996 TAG: 9611190069
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
If it's true that the artist Julian Schnabel meant to show "the conflict between genius and society" through "Basquiat," his film portrait of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, he missed the mark.
It may not have helped Schnabel, ultimately, that he knew Basquiat, because his film illustrates the problem with overfamiliarity with a human subject or emotional material: It's too close to be brought into focus.
In fact, much of this difficult - although interesting - movie is literally hard to see. It's underlit and just too plain dark to read - and, the rest of the time, inscrutable.
What is left to the eye and the ear - the screenplay is also Schnabel's - is half in darkness, half in unfinished sentences and incomplete scenes. The "genius" at conflict with society is reduced to a very troubled, talented young man whose success went to his head and alienated him from all the people who could have helped him.
It is also a funny, damning look at the New York art world with great performances from David Bowie as Andy Warhol; Gary Oldman as a Schnabel-type character; Dennis Hopper as the dealer Bruno Bischofberger; Benicio Del Toro as Basquiat's friend Benny Dalmau; and Parker Posey as the bloodless gallery owner Mary Boone.
Jeffrey Wright, a stage actor (``Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk''), plays Jean-Michel Basquiat, who stood at his mother's side as a boy and watched her weep in the presence of Picasso's "Guernica." Somehow, he ends up living in a cardboard box, but possessed of sufficient confidence to burst in on Warhol and Bischofberger as they are having lunch at a very nice Soho restaurant. Basquiat shows them his "ignorant art" in postcard form, and they proceed to bicker over who will get what. "These are very good," Warhol croons.
It isn't long before one of Basquiat's paintings happens to be spotted by the art writer Rene Ricard (Michael Wincott), who thinks he has seen something extraordinary in the young man's graffitied paintings. He promises to make Basquiat rich and famous, and is true to his word.
A big opening is mere months away, and Basquiat is attracting the best and worst of the art world. He is labeled a "ghetto" artist for his unschooled, street style, but fights with his own flesh - taking up the heroin habit - as he feels increasingly burdened by the label "black artist."
In one of the movie's finest scenes, Basquiat - at the peak of his fame and surrounded by his work - is interviewed by a patronizing journalist (Christopher Walken) who walks unwittingly into the trap he hopes will ensnare the artist and reveal him as a pretender, and a shrewdly manipulative one at that.
It seems clear that Schnabel wants us to see that it would have been a much bigger shock and surprise if Basquiat had come to some other end. How could he have been expected to survive in the shark-infested waters of the art world?
Apparently, only the strong survive - not necessarily the most talented.
***
Basquiat
***
Rated R for profanity and adult situations, a Miramax release showing at the Grandin Theatre, 106 minutes.
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Jeffrey Wright (from left), Davie Bowie, Gary Oldman andby CNBDennis Hopper star in Julian Schnabel's ``Basquiat.'' Type first letter of feature OR type help for list of commands FIND S-DB DB OPT SS WRD QUIT QUIT Save options? YES NO GROUP YOU'VE SELECTED: QUIT YES login: c