In the Hand of Dante, on Netflix: an arty and suffocatingly Christian thriller

Julian Schnabel has assembled an insane cast, from Al Pacino to Gal Gadot, to adapt Nick Tosches’ dark novel about the mysteries of The Divine Comedy.

Two films duel in In the Hand of Dante. The first is a rather pleasant black and white thriller which tells the story of how the American writer Nick Tosches (played by Oscar Isaac), famous rock critic and biographer of Dean Martin, finds himself caught up in a mafia war, during which art-loving gangsters try to get their hands on the manuscript of The Divine Comedy by Dante, discovered by chance by a Sicilian priest. The second film is a reconstruction in costumes and colors of moments in the life of the said Dante (also played by Oscar Isaac), in the midst of creative, mystical and amorous doubt, at the time he wrote his masterpiece, at the beginning of the 14th century.

Presented thus, the project of director Julian Schnabel, who adapts the novel Dante’s Hand by Nick Tosches (published in 2002), can seem like a tightrope walk. And he is. The intrepid duration (2h35) and the insane casting (which combines Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Franco Nero, and even Martin Scorsese as an old medieval sage with a flowery beard) also testify to the crazy ambition of the painter-filmmaker Schnabel, here at the heart of his eternal concerns (art, love, money, and God in all that?), thirty years after his debut in the cinema with Basquiateight years after his last film (At Eternity’s Gateon Van Gogh).

There is a suffocating-Christian side to this “two-in-one” film, which can on paper evoke other terminal auteurist whims a la Megalopolis (Coppola) or The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Gilliam). Schnabel makes his “floating” and Malickian camera swirl around his actors, regularly panting towards the sky as if to ask a question to the Almighty. But most of the time – at least in the first hour – he avoids the traps of thinking and favors pleasure.

A small pre-9/11 New York mafia carnival unfolds before our eyes, in a chic and icy black and white that evokes the series Ripley by Steven Zaillian: Oscar Isaac plays Tosches with the required intensity, jaws clenched and nerves on edge, Al Pacino makes a face like uncle streetwise who provides his wise advice, John Malkovich doesn’t put up too much of an art dealer, and a demented Gerard Butler carries the day as a clumsy and vulgar (and blond) henchman, who relaxes in the evening by putting on women’s underwear to enjoy a pizza on his bed.

The “other” film, the one in color in 14th century Tuscany, is much less convincing, largely burdened by the choice to bring back the protagonists of the black and white thriller in other roles, in order to establish somewhat vague correspondences between the eras – and this is how Gerard Butler suddenly appears in the clothes of Pope Boniface VIII… The film will then be diluted little by little into a philosophical hodgepodge on the part Mephistophelian of artistic creation, giving all the prestigious actors summoned here the air of having disguised themselves for a somewhat cheap docu-fiction (Scorsese, serious and comical at the same time, comes out miraculously).

In the Hand of Dante collapses definitively when Jason Momoa arrives as a Palermo gangster in love with a librarian crazy about The Divine Comedyand that Schnabel ends up delivering his very advertising vision of paradise – taking it easy on a sandy beach in the company of Gal Gadot. At its best, his film feels like an arty, sexy version of Dan Brown’s esoteric bestsellers, type Inferno. Amusing. But probably not quite what the very erudite and badass Nick Tosches was aiming for when he wrote Dante’s Hand.

In the Hand of Danteby Julian Schnabel, with Oscar Isaac, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot… On Netflix.