Final Portrait review: A rough outline sketch of Giacometti the great oddball artist

“It’s impossible to ever finish a portrait,” the artist Alberto Giacometti cautions his latest model, American writer James Lord, near the beginning of Stanley Tucci’s wry, affectionate mini-biopic. Tucci, directing for the first time in a decade, honours his eccentric subject by sticking to that mantra.

Far from a complete painting, this is a sketch, an outline, done in casual, quick strokes and left both intriguingly and frustratingly rough — capturing something of Giacometti’s oddball spirit without shading in much character detail or biographical context, and dipping in to just 18 days of the Swiss artist’s life and career as he dabbles, dawdles and despairs over Lord’s portrait in his shabby-chic Paris studio.

It’s left to actor Geoffrey Rush to add colour, if not much depth, to this study: his Giacometti is a lively, endearing mass of itchy tics, brittle body language and ardent cigarette-sucking, beneath an untended frizz of steel-wool hair.

The best biopics tend to be snapshots of a figure at a certain place and time, rather than trying to cram the key moments of an entire life, Wikipedia-style, into a couple of hours. Tucci knows this but his film is knowingly slight even by such standards.

With the artwork in question a minor project relative to Giacometti’s signature stretched, mottled sculptures, the human and historical stakes are low: the film mirrors the artist’s own distracted nature, taking in the diversions of pavement cafés, joyrides with a young mistress, and ambling, circuitous conversations with a bemused Lord about everything from mathematics to Picasso — airily dismissed by Giacometti in one of the film’s few nods to the wider art scene.

Firm of jaw and crisp of blazer, Lord is played by Armie Hammer, and it’s small wonder the portrait gets repeatedly delayed: if most of us were faced with transferring such a daunting degree of chiselled all-American beauty to canvas, we’d probably give up entirely.

Danny Cohen’s camera grazes in luxuriant close-up on Hammer’s flawless face as he poses, but Lord remains hard to penetrate: beyond snatches of exasperated phone calls with a boyfriend in New York it’s hard to glean much of his character, his passions, his own motivation for seeing the eternally incomplete painting through.

That might be the point of Tucci’s wily portrait of the artist as a ragged old man: perhaps Giacometti, for all his artistic vision, couldn’t quite see through the surface either.

Cert 15, 90 mins