Altman probably saw something of himself in the story of van Gogh. Vincent and Theo came out ten years after Altman's last major Hollywood film, Popeye. Prior to that film, Altman made five idiosyncratic films for 20th Century Fox, beginning with Three Women and concluding with Health which met with varying degrees of critical success. The commercial viability Altman had in the first half of the Seventies had disappeared by the end of the decade. At one point in Vincent and Theo, Theo tells Vincent that there is no market for his work, to which Vincent response that it is Theo job to create the market. One can imagine similar discussions between Altman and studio executives. Vincent and Theo was Altman's last theatrical film before being "re-discovered" with The Player, where Altman had the opportunity to publicly bite the hand that grudgingly fed him.

No film about van Gogh can escape from the shadow of Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Altman has a grubbier, more sinewy van Gogh in the form of Tim Roth. Both films fail for similar reasons - an assumption is made that the film viewer is familiar with at least the outlines of van Gogh's life, and that the viewer understands already what makes van Gogh significant as an artist. Altman does a slightly better job in having a character mention the influence of Japanese art on van Gogh, and conveying van Gogh's identification with workers as well as his interest in lower-class people as subjects for art. Altman also improves on presenting the fractious relationship between van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. If one has limited knowledge about art and artists, Vincent and Theo reinforces the idea that the film was made simply because the artist was famous, leaving why he is famous unanswered. By presenting van Gogh as the proto tortured and starving artist while ignoring the meaning of his artwork, Vincent and Theo becomes a film about a person who is famous for being famous, a celebrity biography with claims to higher aspirations.