Filmmaker Julian Schnabel returns to a familiar topic with his In the Hand of Dante… sort of. The painter-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has dedicated most of his career to dramatizing the personal demons and trials of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas, and Vincent van Gogh — and depending on how one defines “artist,” Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subject of The Diving Bell & the Butterfly might fall under the same rubric — and, with Schnabel’s new film, one can add Dante Alighieri to that list, albeit with a sizable caveat. The 14th-century Italian poet best known for writing The Comedy (more commonly referred to as The Divine Comedy in contemporary parlance), Dante is played here by Oscar Isaac as a man mired in a spiritual and creative block; struggling for years to give birth to the magnum opus that would come to define him, not to mention inspire a glut of movie serial killers. The film dutifully presents Dante’s banishment from Florence and his fraught journey to Sicily where he would go on to write his masterwork, along the way crossing paths with Pope Bonifacio (Gerard Butler) and taking the counsel of an old sage (the filmmaker Martin Scorsese behind an enormous bushy beard, an image that’s almost certain to outlast the film itself), all while keeping his devoted wife, Gemma (Gal Gadot), at an emotional remove. Yet, perhaps in acknowledgment of how little is known about Dante’s inner life or how little the author’s life conforms to the shape of a conventional biopic — or, for that matter, what an iffy commercial proposition a straightforward biopic of Alighieri would be — the film dedicates the majority of its runtime to a lurid parallel narrative that treats the existence of an original manuscript of The Comedy as a seismic event in the criminal underworld of the 21st century. One where hardened killers knock off anyone who stands in the way of an incalculable fortune and romance echoes across centuries. Past and present are meant to comment upon one another, but, in truth, it all plays like flipping channels between highbrow and lowbrow, often on a scene-by-scene basis.
Based on the novel by Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante primarily follows embittered writer and modern-day Dante scholar, Nick Tosches — yes, the author made himself the protagonist of the story — also played by Isaac. Set in 2001 for reasons that only belatedly reveal themselves, Nick is drawn into a well-funded conspiracy by the mysterious Joe Black (John Malkovich) to steal what is purported to be the long-believed lost-to-time original copy of Dante’s The Comedy from an elderly mafioso (Franco Nero) in Palermo. Partnered somewhat against his will with the sociopathic henchman Louie (Butler again, in a role that is dispositionally not a world apart from his work in the Den of Thieves films), Nick and his grouchy handler fly by private jet to Italy. Upon arriving at the mafia don’s villa, Louie proceeds to execute anyone who so much as offers them a glass of water. Immediately returning to the States with the manuscript in their possession (not before rubbing out further accomplices along the way), Nick is entrusted with the near-impossible task of authenticating a 700-year-old text where there are no surviving handwriting samples to compare it against. This finds Nick criss-crossing the globe, taking him to laboratories for carbon dating and archives in Italy in an effort to accumulate enough contextual evidence for the manuscript to hold up to scrutiny on the black market. And all the while, Louie continues to “sweep up” behind him, killing every librarian and archivist Nick engages with in order to keep their secret safe, which is the kind of thing that tends to draw unwanted attention.
That attention arrives in the form of Rosario, a brutish figure dressed in white linen and played by Jason Momoa (the vagaries of international financing being what they are likely explains how the film ends up casting one-third of Zack Snyder’s Justice League), who believes the manuscript belongs in Italy. Or maybe, like everyone else, he’s just interested in getting rich and is not above torture or murder to achieve that end. Either way, the hulking character lurks in darkened corners and pursues Nick across Europe, imperiling both him as well as Nick’s new lover, Giulietta (Gadot, like seemingly half the cast, also doing double-duty). Meanwhile, the increasingly desperate Nick finds the walls closing in on him and fewer and fewer places to hide as he attempts to claim the manuscript entirely for himself while trying to insulate Giulietta from harm, all while navigating a secret world of shadowy power brokers and Mephistophelian figures.
Alternating between boxy academy ratio filmed in color to denote the 1300s and widescreen black-and-white for the 2000s, In the Hand of Dante is ultimately neither fish nor fowl. The scenes featuring Dante are presented with hushed solemnity befitting both Schabel and Tosches’ (that would be the author, not the character) reverence for the poet. But the film all but assumes a similar level of, if not appreciation, then certainly a familiarity with The Comedy, allowing it to mostly eschew exposition pitched at the cheap seats or contrived dramatic fireworks in telling what’s largely a quiet journey of the self. For whatever its failings, no one would damn In the Hand of Dante with the designation of being a “Wikipedia film.” The closest thing the film has to a “You’ve done it, Pollock; you’ve cracked it wide open” moment is when Isaac kills a carnivorous rat and throws its small body against the wall where its blood leaves the mark of a crucifix. Instead, Schnabel presents Dante’s uncertainty and doubt as largely internalized matters; favoring shots of the character staring aloft at the heavens or having Isaac and Gadot silently gaze beatifically at one another as the camera circles them. When characters do speak, it’s primarily in riddles meant to approximate Renaissance-era prose, and some of the actors acquit themselves better than others. There’s a self-seriousness to scenes of, for example, Dante being bestowed the very parchment on which he is to write The Comedy that verges on the parodic, or upon reciting a passage from Paradiso being told “God has breathed into you and from you” (given voice by no less an authority than Scorsese). These scenes regularly achieve a stultifying level of humorlessness that leaves little room for the filmmaker’s typical impressionistic flourishes — and even those are reserved for the modern-day story, such as a sequence that finds Gadot’s character recreating The Birth of Venus against the backdrop of a CGI tidal wave — or any actual lifeblood.
It gets so that when the film does finally cut back to the skullduggery and off-brand Sopranos plotting of Nick in the (semi-)present day, it begins to feel like a reprieve from all the respectful cosplay. Watching Nick evade Italian gangsters against a backdrop of the Venetian canals or shooting co-conspirators point-blank in the head lends the proceedings a superficial charge, but there’s also something impersonal and halfhearted about the pulpiness — aside from Butler, who embraces Louie’s loutishness and quickness to violence with a commendable disinterest in ingratiating himself to the audience. It all has the shape of something thrilling — exotic locales, unexpected bursts of gunfire, doublecrosses, witnesses turning up dead — but in its execution, it’s as simplistic and facile as the 1300 scenes are artfully ponderous. That’s exemplified in instances like a fairly absurd climactic scene, which finds Momoa and Gadot’s characters engaged in an armed standoff that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of the Fast & Furious films. Further, try as the film might, the Dante scenes never really inform the Nick ones; the closest the film comes is having Nick and Giulietta come to the realization that they are the living embodiment of Dante and Gemma, reunited hundreds of years after their respective deaths. Not only do the narratives exist on tracks that rarely thematically intersect, but the approach creates a tonal whiplash where neither series of events has the opportunity to sustain momentum or become fully realized, instead lurching from incident to incident while leaving connective tissue largely elided. In the Hand of Dante is almost cruelly designed in a way that seems destined to please no one. Interested in a meditative period drama? What about a sleazy airport novel? Here’s a film that does both, but neither especially well!
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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