Australia is certainly at the arts end of the world, put on the global creative cartography by Brett Whiteley, and James Bogle’s brilliant documentary is completely deserving of Brett’s talent. WHITELEY may well be the best Australian film of the year.
Writer/director James Bogle and co writer, Victor Gentile, have fashioned a fine feature film from Whiteley’s own voice, and the voices of his muse and ex wife, Wendy, either captured on archival footage or recreated from notebooks and interviews over four decades.
Like most artists, this larrikin painter subordinated his life to the overwhelming needs of his art. It is a selfishness, but a selfishness that creates great and enduring art.
Infused with Whiteley’s art, the film is assuredly and undeniably a work of art in itself, as it seeks to fathom the mysteries and intrigue of genius, the confusions and contradictions of this sensitive, selfish man with a soaring talent.
Bogle has succeeded in collecting, collating and creating an intensely interpretive and emotional experience of Whiteley’s life.
Like Whiteley, the film is larger than life, overflowing the frame, gorgeous in its gorging on genius.
The film follows the epiphany that a very young Brett had about art, image and imagination, through to his burgeoning brush with fame, and his fateful meeting with Wendy when she was 15 and he was 17.
The pair were to blaze an erotic and narcotic trajectory through the art world both here and abroad.
Impressive and irrepressible, responsive and irresponsible, Whiteley was a paradox of prodigious paranoia and productivity, a creator with a destructive streak, confused yet focused, fearless yet frightfully fearful.
WHITELEY is a wondrous portrait of a complex human, using the palette of the private and public artist, desiring recognition, fearing rejection, an introspective extrovert, absurdly exhilarating and disturbingly dark.
Riven with contradiction the subject may have been, there is nothing contrary about the film WHITELEY, just compelling, compulsive and compulsory viewing.