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Julian Schnabel’s Bizarre Epic Fails to Meet Dante’s Peak

I wonder how familiar Julian Schnabel is with Sunday in the Park with George. He’s a New Yorker and an artist so the chances I think are pretty high. It is one of Stephen Sondheim’s perhaps underrated musicals but a favourite of mine and just about everyone else who has seen it. It is about a painter, Georges Seurat, and his obsession with finishing his great masterpiece while also about a cynical modern descendant reckoning with that work. It is a very compelling premise that invites new consideration of not only the legacy of an artist but an interrogation of artistry itself. And Schnabel is certainly interested in those themes, having explored them in his two movies about complicated artists, Basquiat and At Eternity’s Gate.
In the Hand of Dante is not like those films. Really, it’s not like any film, at least in the details. But it does feel like a culmination of sorts for Schnabel, who has been working on it in some capacity or another for fifteen years -since it was being developed for Johnny Depp, an ardent fan of Nick Tosches, author of the book it is based on as well as the book’s central character. Sometimes a long gestating period pays off and results in a piece of brilliance. Other times it is an overcooked mess. It is not fair to call In the Hand of Dante either of these, a film that is too discombobulated to be the former but also too uniquely deranged to be the latter.
The film constantly shifts between two storylines that are reflections of one another shot in different styles and aspect ratios. In a classical square frame and beautiful colour photography we are presented with the story of Dante Alighieri, played by Oscar Isaac, as he works to write his Divine Comedy, seeking inspiration and otherworldly knowledge through Italy and Sicily, coming into contact with an array of wise and provocative figures. Meanwhile in conventional widescreen and black-and-white, the story follows Tosches himself -also played by Isaac, a New York writer and Dante expert who is recruited by the mafia to go to Italy, verify the original text of the Divine Comedy and then steal it, Tosches himself going down a dark rabbit hole in the process of this.
Both narratives which run concurrently but are not paced evenly are clear analogues to the Divine Comedy, with the segments concerning Dante positing the text as being drawn from a personal journey of its author, and the parts about Tosches playing out the narrative in the form of a heist crime drama, with plenty of violent assassinations interspersed with the musings on philosophy and theology. You can follow pretty starkly in each storyline the structure of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, suggesting a recurring universality of the story across time as well as its versatility. It is a pretty interesting concept.
It is also, as composed here, a chaotic mess that in its most overt moments verges on parody, not just of Dante, but of its own source material. The very notion of contrasting a spiritual journey in the thirteenth century with a mafia's bewildering compulsion to pull off a National Treasure heist is palpably absurd and the script does nothing to hide or mitigate that. And yet Schnabel maintains an aspect of sincerity, in the reverence that Tosches shows for the work, the exaltation of both Dante and Tosches's relationships with their respective wives, and the choice to employ dual casting of not just Isaac but several of his co-stars to make blatant the mirror storylines. Schnabel's commitment to form likewise holds nothing back -chapters of Dante's story mimic the atmosphere and ruminations of Terence Malick, while bits of the gang drama that even involve Tosches himself evoke the most vivid violence of a Scorsese crime film. In each case there is an unmistakable air of compensation motivating these stylistic choices.
Scorsese is in the film by the way -his second random movie appearance in a month and the one that uses him better though it is just as much of a gimmick. Sporting a great bushy beard, he plays Dante's wise mentor Isaiah -though he is not the only odd casting choice. Al Pacino plays Tosches's New Jersey uncle in a flashback scene near the film's beginning, a potential equivalent to Isaiah but is never seen or referenced again. Meanwhile the more prominent supporting players include Gerard Butler as gang enforcer Louie (also Pope Boniface VIII), Gal Gadot as Gemma and Giulietta -the wives of both Dante and Tosches, Jason Momoa as a hitman, Louis Cancelmi as Tosches's fellow goon, and John Malkovich as the mafia don. A generally impressive cast and yet few of them turn in good performances. Momoa is wasted and Malkovich merely goes through the motions of his usual performance style while not being particularly convincing in the part. Gadot is just broadly flat and unimpressive, and Butler is unhinged in the most goofball cliché gangster performance I’ve seen in a while -there is something fun to it occasionally, but for the most part it is just perplexing. Isaac himself manages well through some of the film, playing Dante as that kind of roguish intellectual he has made as a semi-brand for himself, though he is also clearly disoriented in other parts of the movie, especially as Tosches is required to go further and further into darker territory  that Schnabel just can’t quite sell honestly.
Because beyond being meta-interpretations of the Divine Comedy in a story about both the writing and procuring of the Divine Comedy, Schnabel also uses that text and the film’s contrasting timelines as a form of commentary. The stylistic distinctions between the two halves are highly intentional -the colours and beautiful Sicilian imagery speaking to an environment of enlightenment and romance, as even Dante’s dreams and visions gel with lived reality; whilst the stark coldness of the modern era almost reflects a film noir sensibility of cynicism, greed, and violence. But they are each aesthetics very creatively meagre and make out Schnabel’s intentions to be fundamentally shallow. After all, he shot Basquiat in black and white and that wasn’t so bleak an insinuation, whilst At Eternity’s Gate, a film rich in visual splendor, is unremittingly depressing at times. On that subject, while Schnabel’s interest in vivid, painterly compositions is sparingly on display through the Dante sequences -although he does merely homage in some instances, such as making Gadot into the Birth of Venus- he allows no such imagery into the other storyline, which is in fact visually hectic in places, such as a strangely edited climactic sequence. It’s as though Schnabel has as little interest there as his audience.
In the Hand of Dante is a confounding movie, as pretty in some places as it is ugly in others. It is a film full of eccentricities that are taken at face value in spite of the script, the performances, and even the direction seemingly emphasizing them sarcastically. For its many efforts to appear so, it is not a movie that comes across as meticulous and thoughtful, its digressions into areas of intellectual curiosity not relayed with enough substance to save them from the trap of pretension, which is a marker Schnabel has had to deal with before. It is a weird failure at least, perhaps the weirdest of the year, and its strokes can sometimes be admirable -and there is certainly great artistry nestled within it (casting Benjamin Clementine as Mephistopheles is one of its better bold choices). But it doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny -a long-awaited labour of love where the labour is felt much more than the love.

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