In the Hand of Dante is streaming on Netflix now.
Star-studded yet defiantly dull, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante crosscuts a turn-of-the-century mob saga with a Late Middle Ages tale of how Dante Alighieri came to write The Divine Comedy. The movie, which made its debut at the Venice Film Festival and is now on Netflix, is ambitious in concept, but squanders its artistic potential thanks to its languid unfurling, courtesy of a rote, observational aesthetic approach. It feels like studying poetry purely by reading someone’s academic notes rather than experiencing the verses themselves.
Adapted from the 2002 novel by the late Nick Tosches, Schnabel’s movie recreates the book’s narrative conceit by positioning Tosches as its protagonist. This fictionalized version of the author, played by Oscar Isaac, is roped into a harebrained New York mob scheme to steal a literary treasure: recently-unearthed writing penned by Dante himself in the early 14th century, the only artifact of its kind. But before the lost manuscript is revealed, the story begins with Tosches regaling his friend Lefty (Louis Cancelmi) about how much he identifies with Dante and sees himself in the poet’s work. The movie literalizes this by having Isaac play Dante too.
It’s a commendable flourish and creates the kind of connections that could only exist in a visual medium. However, the movie immediately over-extends itself by granting pretty much its entire ensemble similar double roles. Nearly every actor from the movie’s widescreen black-and-white present cross-pollinates in the vivid 4:3 period segments, but in a manner that seldom creates thematic resonance. While it makes perfect sense to have Gal Gadot play Tosches’ love interest in one timeline and Dante’s wife in the other, Cancelmi plays both the author’s low-level mob hoodlum pal and an Italian noble lording over Dante, while Gerard Butler is cast as violent mob enforcer Louie as well as the austere Pope Boniface VIII. This might lead one to assume the film contains some commentary on social or religious structures, but the actors’ reappearances feel largely incidental.
The main plot is set in the early 2000s and sees Tosches hired by mafia head honcho Joe Black (John Malkovich) to travel to Italy to retrieve and authenticate what could be Dante’s only surviving handwriting, which the mob hopes to sell for a hefty sum. With Butler’s Louie as his trigger-happy cleanup crew, Tosches’ scheme goes gradually off the rails across the movie’s oppressive 153 minutes. However, some initial flashbacks to major events in the author’s life lay the groundwork for a confrontation of religion that never truly materializes. Al Pacino makes an impact in his single scene as Tosches’ uncle, advising a younger version of the writer on how to reckon with his violent actions in a Catholic context, while a fleeting beat of personal tragedy leads to Tosches’ pivot away from religion altogether. These hints of meaningful personal drama are far more interesting than the sluggish heist saga that follows, which ends up bogged down by the kind of florid, repetitive conversations that are emblematic of a film student making their first mob picture.
The movie ends up bogged down by the kind of florid, repetitive conversations that are emblematic of a film student making their first mob picture.
If the movie’s surface-level struggle between religion and violence sounds a tad Scorsesean — down to the Rolling Stones needle drops ripped right from Mean Streets — this inspiration becomes even more overt when Martin Scorsese himself appears in the movie as Dante’s elderly teacher. It’s a worthwhile role that verges on engaging with the kind of soul-searching that led Dante to write his masterpiece in the first place, but it’s also a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle that fails to stir the soul. By the time the movie tries to combine its reflective elements with some semblance of propulsion, courtesy of Jason Momoa as a gruff Italian hatchet man on Tosches’ tail, the film has wandered off in too many different directions to meaningfully cohere.
Like the novel, its setting runs on either side of September 11th 2001, but the incident is mere background noise. Meanwhile, all the initial hubbub about Tosches seeing himself in Dante — the very reason for its casting conceit! — yields only nominal connections between the movie’s dueling timelines despite hints of something more esoteric connecting past and present. At the very least, the actual details of how one might verify an ancient document are a subject of intrigue, but they don’t take up nearly enough of the runtime.
As both stories lurch forward, Schnabel and cinematographer Roman Vasyanov employ a noncommittal approach wherein their handheld camera floats listlessly between close-ups, a visual trick (or perhaps visual tic) that recurs with no meaningful evolution or variation, making for a nagging irony (intentional or otherwise) given an early scene in which Tosches discusses Dante as having been trapped by his poetic form. Schnabel ends up similarly stifled by this mere sliver of style, part of a larger whole left on the table if his previous films about artists — Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, At Eternity’s Gate — are any indication. Where he once made magic, he now pens a dry instruction manual that tries to explain the trick.
