FINAL PORTRAIT (2017)

Stanley Tucci, with more than a hundred acting credits over four decades, has something of a legit sideline on a handful of directing gigs.  The films mostly focused on stunted creatives in Food: BIG NIGHT/’96; Writing: JOE GOULD’S SECRET/’00 and Painting: FINAL PORTRAIT.  Each suffers from giving the game away in the first reel: a chef who can’t compromise; a writer who won’t write; a sculptor/painter who doesn’t finish; yet all quite watchable if you don’t mind the tone of self-congratulatory appreciation.*  Shot in the U.K., but showing a good feel for ‘60s Paris, PORTRAIT is helped by a real deal subject. Alberto Giocometti , mostly known for his impossibly elegant, tall, spindly sculpture, here working on a painted portrait of writer James Lord (the film taken from his memoir).  The artist’s life coming into view when a two-day sitting expands to nearly a month.  (It also can seem that long to the audience.)  Fortunately, things are regularly enlivened by guest appearances from Giocometti’s ill-treated wife, his exuberant mistress and his wise, patient artist brother, nicely played by Tony Shalhoub.  All pleasant, interesting, not exactly necessary.  The film getting an accidental edge because of various sexual lapses by our leads, Geoffrey Rush, now cleared, but at the time under some sort of investigation.   (Giocometti also cops to some perverse dreams in the film.)  And more notoriously, Armie Hammer, who plays Lord, currently unemployable after some sort of misconduct/fantasies discovered.  But since he sounds exactly like Jon Hamm and looks like Ryan Reynolds, you may not realize he’s been off the screen recently.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Of the three, JOE GOULD’S SECRET, no doubt because its investigator, the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, went on to his own monumental case of writer’s block, is conceptually the most interesting, in execution least satisfying.