In the Hand of Dante mocks itself — but Pacino and Scorsese bail it out.
Another Julian Schnabel biopic, In the Hand of Dante, confers grandeur upon one of his contemporaries as a way of explaining Schnabel’s own ambitions. This time it’s Nick Tosches, the flamboyant rock-music writer, who gets compared to the medieval Italian Dante Alighieri. The conceit began with Tosches, who in 1992 wrote the novel In the Hand of Dante in his particular style of post-beatnik self-aggrandizing pulp. Schnabel fell in love with the conceit and contrived a film in three tenses: Tosches’s salvation-or-damnation autobiography (another half-intense portrayal of anguished genius by Oscar Isaac). A crime-novel fantasy in which Tosches befriends a New Jersey mob hitman (miscast Gerard Butler) assigned by his art-loving capo (another florid weirdo from John Malkovich) to go to Italy and steal the original manuscript of The Divine Comedy. And a classical period drama about Dante (Isaac, again) searching for God and his beloved, idealized Beatrice while settling with his down-to-earth wife (Gal Gadot striking model poses in a time-shifting dual role). Schnabel juggles these tenses, shifting casually from black and white to color, from violent drama to absurdist moralizing.
The film’s nearly three-hour complexity elevates Tosches from his status as a rock-music critic to a literary gangster, echoing Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Gay Talese, as well as Dante. Tosches joins Schnabel’s hall of ill-fame bad boys: Jean-Michel Basquiat (Basquiat), Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls), Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Lou Reed (Lou Reed: Berlin), and Vincent Van Gogh (At Eternity’s Gate).
Each of those strikingly stylized films distinguish Schnabel’s move from the art world to directing. He obviously sees himself reflected in these artists, and that identification is part of what makes In the Hand of Dante an impressive, unholy mess. Schnabel aims to capture the spiritual turmoil of a man’s creative anguish, but he falls short of Bob Dylan’s homage to Dante in “Tangled Up in Blue” (“An Italian poet from the 13th century”) and the nerd’s confession from Morrissey that makes “Lester Bangs” so moving through its proper scale of inspiration, judgment, and grateful depth. (“I lean / And you are leaned upon.”) He answers Morrissey’s “How does it feel to be you?” with an unrelenting series of not-so-divine Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and Breaking Bad rip-offs.
Perhaps it’s the times we live in that prevent Schnabel from making perfect sense of Tosches’s folly and awkwardness. Tosches is vaunted by the rock-crit establishment as was Bangs, and he’s known for writing Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982), which emphasized the sacred-and-profane struggle of the piano player and rock-shouter with Southern Christianity. Linking Tosches with Dante, “the bird of Florence,” confuses American fundamentalism, Catholicism, and Tosches’s high-brow careerism, Schnabel’s typical upgrade of the artistic profession. This awkward blend of sin and achievement resembles the Dylanolatry of Inside Llewyn Davis and A Complete Unknown where the Coen brothers’ sarcasm and James Mangold’s solemnity came a cropper, but it lacks the magnificence of Andrei Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo biopic Sin.
Schnabel’s tonal mishmash combines gangster argot and classical speech so ridiculously that the film almost never recovers: “Is it hell that welcomes thine eye, or wilt thou gaze heavenward? Beware, lest thy wandering eye fall upon your wife’s despair.” Or try: “Countless words of love have I writ that flowed from my pen like drool from the mouth of one asleep.”
This laughable discrepancy between Tosches’s creative striving and Schnabel’s sense of classical moral endeavor indicates a specific modern crisis. Tosches and Dante struggle through mankind’s ruthlessness and greed, so recognizably grim and unceasing that Schnabel captures the millennium’s miasma. He stumbles upon two terrific moments that play out his own creative dilemma: first, Tosches’s early adolescent trauma about killing a peer. In a self-infatuated view of himself, Tosches confesses the deed to his uncle Carmine (Al Pacino), and “the knife-wielding child that lay within me” relays a spiritual predicament stronger than any of Schnabel’s noirish hijinks. This is largely because Pacino imparts awesome, uncanny gravitas. (His observation that “God’s everywhere” redeems all post-Godfather cinema.) Second, Dante seeks advice from a saintly elder, Isaiah (Martin Scorsese), which transitions into a petition so ardent that it seems to speak for Schnabel’s own entreaty. When Dante asks, “And God is?,” he is answered by a white-bearded Scorsese intoning a wild jeremiad: “Aura, Anima. Breath and soul. It breathes. It is not trespass. It is entry. You dare to give form to the formless” (echoing Fellini’s “Asa Nisi Masa” riddle for “soul” in 8½).
There’s real conviction in Scorsese’s artist-to-artist response: “Come forth from the tomb of your seeking and be filled with the scent of the very blade of grass of your soul and of every moment of life. Come forth and embrace Her.” Scorsese’s eyes blink as if he’s finally explaining the folly of The Last Temptation of Christ. His second homily goes deeper: “Find your solace in the sky. God is outside and inside of you. He is you. Nothing good comes from fear. Oh brothers, refuse not proof of the unpeopled world that lies beyond the sun. You were not formed to live the life of brutes, but virtue to pursue and knowledge high.” It’s as if Scorsese understands Disclosure Day better than Spielberg, and he certainly has a better grasp of Dante than Schnabel does.
Inflating a writer like Tosches to Dante’s level is more tiresome than the vanity of pretentious suffering artists. Schnabel belabors the conflict of pride and sin that Orson Welles pulled off with genius aplomb in Mr. Arkadin. Greed and power sully the mystery of creativity that Jean Cocteau explored in Orpheus (sometimes using his own voice as narrator). Despite its foolish sincerity, In the Hand of Dante explores the gulf that has appeared between Millennial artists and their moral responsibility. Schnabel’s sincerity is less effective than Franco Zeffirelli’s immersion in Shakespeare and Saint Francis, or Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Schnabel has made a minor film about grandeur, the product of an era shaken from its cultural foundations.
