There is something strangely exhausting about Julian Schnabel’s ‘In the Hand of Dante’. It spends every waking second trying to convince you of its own genius, hurling symbolism, philosophy and grandeur at the screen with evangelical fervour until the story itself quietly slips through the cracks. Narrative becomes collateral damage. All that remains is spectacle admiring its own reflection.
Much like the ‘selva oscura’ — the “dark wood” that opens Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, from which the film borrows both its imagery and ambitions — the story wanders in circles. It drifts, hazily and hyperactively, between two timelines that seem destined to converge, with Oscar Isaac carrying both on his shoulders.
In a sepia-soaked New York, bathed in the conspicuously eerie calm before 9/11, Isaac slips into a thick Italian-American drawl as Nick Tosches, the swaggering, self-important writer whose hobbies include missing deadlines and solving problems with violence. His insufferable nature serves a meta purpose: part intention, part symptom of a film too enamoured with its own importance.
Then there is Florence in the early 14th century. She’s alive with colour, rebellion and wisdom. Here Isaac transforms into Dante Alighieri himself: father of the Italian language, patron saint of exile, inventor of literary redemption — and, depending on your tolerance for medieval allegory, a man who wrote some gloriously bizarre things.
Adapted from the real-life Tosches’ novel of the same name — a fictionalised version of his own life — the film follows the author as he joins forces with a gallery of stereotypical New York mobsters to recover and authenticate the original manuscript of the ‘Divine Comedy’, with every intention of selling it in the black market.
Among them are Joe Black (John Malkovich) and Gerard Butler’s Louie, a hitman whose cruelty feels less like characterisation than a contest with the screenplay to see who can be more gratuitous. As Tosches travels through Italy and the US, Louie paints their trail crimson with a body count so excessive that even dogs are denied mercy. Blood becomes the film’s preferred punctuation mark.
While Tosches heavy-handedly performs the archetype of the tortured genius — marinated in arrogance, alcohol and pills — Dante lives through exile, traversing the inferno, purgatory and paradise of his own making.
Isaac elegantly maps the descent and uneasy reconciliation of these two men, while Butler delivers the film’s most hypnotic performance, playing Louie with an almost inhuman menace.
Gal Gadot, meanwhile, plays both Nick’s assistant and lover Giulietta, and Dante’s wife Gemma. While Beatrice — a woman Dante met only twice, once when he was all but nine — became immortal in his verse, Gemma was famously denied even a mention. The film attempts to lend that omission poetic weight, but Gadot never quite finds the ache, grace or conviction either role demands.
Smaller turns from Sabrina Impacciatore, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Jason Momoa add welcome intrigue.
Visually, ‘In the Hand of Dante’ is among the finest. Venice resembles a Renaissance canvas; New York, a noir photograph left to fade with time.
The film has everything — almost. Superb performances, exquisite cinematography and flashes of terrific dialogue ultimately succumb to its fatal hamartia: the absence of an aching heart. There is a delicious irony in that. Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, for all its theological labyrinths, is one of literature’s most rigorously structured journeys, every circle and canto serving an emotional purpose.
‘In the Hand of Dante’ mistakes complexity for depth. It reaches for paradise but remains hopelessly lost in its own dark wood.