{"id":119064,"date":"2025-09-04T10:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/119064\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T10:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:36:08","slug":"a-folly-that-pulsates-with-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/119064\/","title":{"rendered":"A Folly That Pulsates With Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAny film festival worth its salt will program a movie or two that\u2019s more rooted in delirium than common sense. If you had to choose the wildest, loopiest big swing of a movie to play at the Venice Film Festival<\/a> this year, it would likely come down to two choices: \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee,\u201d Mona Fastvold\u2019s 18th-century cult Shaker musical (imagine \u201cThe Crucible\u201d set in a \u201cHandmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d world where the women are their own puritan oppressors), and \u201cIn the Hand of Dante<\/a>,\u201d Julian Schnabel<\/a>\u2019s impossible-to-pigeonhole literary gangster mystery, which might be described as \u201cThe Da Vinci Code\u201d retold as a violent underworld fairy tale with 14th-century footnotes. But \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee\u201d is a forbiddingly austere slow-motion ramble. \u201cIn the Hand of Dante,\u201d by contrast, is a folly that pulsates with life. Even when it doesn\u2019t add up, it\u2019s the kind of high-flying ride it\u2019s hard to shake off.<\/p>\n

\n\tSchnabel has always been drawn to extreme figures, usually artists, who convert what they\u2019re creating into a matter of life and death. (His last film, in 2018, was the fever-dream Vincent van Gogh drama \u201cAt Eternity\u2019s Gate.\u201d) With \u201cIn the Hand of Dante,\u201d Schnabel adapts a 2002 novel by Nick Tosches, the late counterculture writer who was mostly celebrated for his nonfiction (biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston; books on the drug culture and country music and rock \u2018n\u2019 roll). The decision to adapt that book is almost a red flag, since the novel itself was a grand mess. For a good while, though, Schnabel streamlines it into an entertainingly low-down saga of the place where violent crime meets poetic passion.<\/p>\n

\n\tOscar Isaac<\/a>, with louche long hair and a snaky hostility, plays Nick Toches (or, rather, the fictional version of him from the novel), a journalist who\u2019s a hipster-outlaw legend. We meet him as he\u2019s seated in a bar, waxing eloquent about his obsession with Dante\u2019s \u201cDivine Comedy\u201d \u2014 but also about how as a writer, he\u2019d rather be tortured than subjected to the editing process. You can already see the anti-social undercurrents, mixed with the fervor for purity, that make a Schnabel hero. A flashback to Nick\u2019s youth in New Jersey shows him as a kid literally murdering a bully with the bully\u2019s knife. Then he goes home and confesses the crime to his uncle (played by Al Pacino as a gravel-voiced gangster mensch), who tells him that he did nothing wrong, and that he doesn\u2019t need to confess, since God is everywhere and can already hear him. The audience should hold onto that thought, because it becomes part of the movie\u2019s deep-think mix.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re then introduced to Louie, a thug who works for a loan shark, threatening and killing people. He\u2019s played, in blond hair, with a voice of stone-hard vulgarity so thick and intense it\u2019s almost musical, by a nearly unrecognizable Gerard Butler. And from the moment he appears, walking into a bar to torment the owner\u2019s son, which is really just a way of toying with him before he does what has to be done, Butler is mesmerizing. He finds the true note in this killer\u2019s sociopathic blunt-wittedness. Louie is summoned to the apartment of Joe Black, a higher-up gangster played by John Malkovich<\/a> with a manner so quizzical yet threatening that his voice just about quivers with unexpressed rage.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoe is a bit of an art aficionado, with a Rembrandt self-portrait on the wall behind him (Louie calls it \u201cugly\u201d), and he has summoned Louie to tell him about an unimaginably big score. He wants him to go to Italy and steal the most priceless literary treasure that has ever been found \u2014 the original parchment manuscript of \u201cThe Divine Comedy,\u201d written in Dante\u2019s hand. It was discovered in the basement of the Vatican, and if they can sneak it out and sell it, it will be worth millions. We\u2019re already picking up on the fact that, money aside, the discovery isn\u2019t going to mean much to these two. But it will to Nick. The fellow he was talking to in the bar was one of Joe\u2019s associates, and Joe wants to hire Nick to be part of the heist \u2014 and, more important, to lead the process of authenticating the manuscript.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first half of \u201cIn the Hand of Dante\u201d (the films runs 151 minutes) is skewed and violent and gripping enough to make you wish Julian Schnabel would simply make a neorealist gangster movie; he\u2019d be great at it. Butler and Malkovich turn bullying into hambone art, and Isaac magnetizes our sympathy as the daredevil but still relatively civilized Nick, who\u2019s caught in the middle of all this. The scene where Nick and Louie go to a palatial home in Palermo to filch the manuscript has a dizzying suspense (you haven\u2019t experienced the killing of innocent civilians as a no-mercy afterthought until you\u2019ve seen Gerard Butler do it). And once they return, the authentication process \u2014 Nick impersonating a historian so he can sit in old Italian libraries and steal papers that date from Dante\u2019s time; the carbon dating and other precision methods \u2014 turns \u201cIn the Hand of Dante,\u201d for a while, into a fascinating detective story.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut only for a while. Schnabel has already introduced his most florid gambit: flashbacks to Dante Alighieri, who is played by Isaac with a morose Shakespearean flourish. We see Dante\u2019s immersion in local politics and his first glimpse, as a youth, of Beatrice, the 13-year-old girl he would fall in love with, never once speak to, and write the entire \u201cDivine Comedy\u201d in homage to. The flashbacks to Dante\u2019s time don\u2019t exactly heighten the drama, and they don\u2019t pretend to. At heart, they\u2019re ruminations on the meaning of love and God. Yet we go with them (sort of), for a while, notably when Martin Scorsese shows up under a huge white beard as Isaiah, Dante\u2019s wizened mentor, who in a voice of religious delicacy cues Dante to the inner meaning of life.<\/p>\n

\n\tDante\u2019s problem is that he married Guilietta (Gal Gadot), but was in such spiritual thrall to Beatrice that he remained outside his own marriage and his own life. He\u2019s got to learn the mistake of that, which he does when Isaac\u2019s Nick, who is also on some level the reincarnation of Dante (get it?), replays Dante\u2019s marriage by falling into a relationship with Gemma (also played by Gadot), his new Italian work assistant, who has returned to Italy to help him with the manuscript research \u2014 but really to be with him. Are we having a narrative OD yet?<\/p>\n

\n\tBeneath the lofty chatter and mirror-image plot mechanics, \u201cIn the Hand of Dante\u201d is a wake-up-and-embrace-the-world-around-you movie. That\u2019s fine, but you can feel something go out of the film \u2014 like, the ground floor of it \u2014 when Louie and Joe disappear. We\u2019re now left with Nick\u2019s research, his overly ethereally abstract love life, and the tale of an Italian scholar (Sabrina Impacciatore) who reveres Dante and happens to have a gangster boyfriend (played by Jason Momoa!) who will come after Nick and pull out his fingernails. Just wait till you see what happens when these characters start firing guns at each other, or when they meet Mephistopheles (Benjamin Clemtine), who\u2019s a towering chanteuse\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn the Hand of Dante\u201d wants to transcend the narcotic of mere storytelling. It wants you to get high on love and agony and redemption and, yes, God, who the film says is all around us and can indeed see everything, so the secret of life is embracing the God who\u2019s there in every moment. But that\u2019s too much life philosophy to be not fully baked into a movie\u2019s story. And Julian Schnabel \u2014 the one who made \u201cBefore Night Falls,\u201d \u201cThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly,\u201d and \u201cAt Eternity\u2019s Gate\u201d \u2014 is too gifted a filmmaker to pass off this top-heavy layer cake as a fully realized experience for audiences. That said, there are far less invigorating ways to watch a good movie go off the rails than to put yourself in the hand of Schnabel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Any film festival worth its salt will program a movie or two that\u2019s more rooted in delirium than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,66351,2626,65786,50265,4186],"class_list":["post-119064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-in-the-hand-of-dante","tag-john-malkovich","tag-julian-schnabel","tag-oscar-isaac","tag-venice-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}