Movies about people  who create art or literature are especially difficult because the artistic impulse is interior.  How do you convey how someone else views the world other than watching them paint or type or sculpt or think?  It’s the thinking part that is so difficult because visually we cannot get into someone else’s head to see what they see.  It’s up to performers to convey those thoughts through exterior action, behavior, attitude and whatever else they can come up with to illustrate character.  Thankfully, in Final Portrait, the performer is one of the finest, Geoffrey Rush.

Stanley Tucci’s film about painter / sculptor Alberto Giacometti benefits from casting Rush as the restless, troubled artist.  Endlessly smoking and fidgeting, Rush enlivens the part with acerbic wit and the ability to uncover what seems to be a lifetime of failure to attain Giacometti’s artistic goals.  The man is never satisfied, whether it means continually delaying a simple portrait of writer James Lord (Armie Hammer), arguing with his patient wife Annette (Sylvie Testud), funding a sports car for his young mistress Caroline (Clémence Poésy) or just looking back at the value of his own early work.  Giacometti is self-destructive, yet cannot keep trying to create, attempting to bring to life glimpses of the world as he sees it.

Rush is great, anchoring the story in more ways than one.  Final Portrait works pretty well as a comic character drama, testing James Lord’s patience to the limit as he waits for the renowned painter to be satisfied with his own work.  Writer-director Tucci is clearly enthralled with the creative process, following each stroke of paint on the canvas hoping that it will reveal Lord’s inner character.  But two factors interfere: Lord himself is a very polite dullard, and the film itself has too little action.  The enemy of art is dullness — the mundane — and that is surely in evidence here.

Final Portrait is a commendable attempt to illustrate how the creative process plays out, on both ends, from artist to subject.  But while art is often a heightened view of reality, the film struggles to show how something spectacularly superior can emerge from a dirty Parisian enclave.  It would have helped had the final portrait itself been masterly, but I don’t see it that way.  The film’s focus, of course, is on the struggle to create something grand, and that is conveyed well.  That Giacometti cannot complete his portrait to his own satisfaction is the frustrating, yet rewarding irony of Tucci’s chronicle.  Great art is obviously difficult to create.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  27 April 2018.