IN THE HAND OF DANTE. It can be reflexive — instinctive, even — when confronted with a grand-to-grandiose work, especially one that spans genres as quickly as it does centuries, to dismiss it as muddled, misguided or unaware of its own intentions. But this reaction dismisses the work’s substance, the meaning that compels the artist to undertake the ultimately futile effort of rendering it unto us. The inverse reaction, then, is to praise the work as greater than our understanding, bestowed by some elevated, ephemeral mind animated by an intelligence and inspiration beyond our capacity to grasp. On one hand, we misunderstand the divine spark. On the other, we perceive the artists’ fundamental misunderstanding, their hubris. Either way, we simultaneously elevate and denigrate the work as something other, a mistake of fate or craft.
From what little I know about Julian Schnabel, I think he enjoys confounding the audience with this contradictory confluence; maybe the late Nick Tosches did, too.
In the Hand of Dante, adapted from Tosches’ 2002 novel by Schnabel and Louise Kogelberg, could fairly be criticized as pretentious, overreaching and abstrusely self-congratulatory. Like most of Schabel’s movies — The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) being the best-received and most conspicuous outlier — it concerns itself primarily with art and artists, pointedly contrasting the work of a tortured poet from almost a millennium past with the crass, avaricious pursuit of his work in the early 20th century.
In New York City, just before 9/11, a fictionalized Tosches (Oscar Isaac), beset by the vagaries of commerce and a self-described transcendent mind, is tapped by an underworld figure (John Malkovich) to retrieve and authenticate the original, handwritten manuscript of The Divine Comedy. Accompanied by a sociopathic functionary (Gerard Butler), he makes his way to Sicily, takes possession of the document and sets off a bloodbath. Motivated as much by greed as literary reverence, he finds himself at the intersection of organized crime and art history. Much like Dante (Isaac again) himself, as the movie would have it, albeit 900 years earlier.
The movie intercuts, sometimes successfully, the excommunication and subsequent (divine?) inspiration of the poet with the 20th century journalist/novelist’s struggle to survive the circumstances of his employment and enrich himself in the process.
Regardless of one’s personal veneration (or lack thereof) for Dante’s work, it must be acknowledged as one of the fundamental texts, a primary influence on all of the literature to follow (at least all of that stemming from the Judeo-Christian/European/white tradition) and, most germane to the plot at hand, an (almost) priceless historical artifact. So, when Tosches/Schnabel cast their protagonist in the mode of the Ur-author, we are presented with the primary narrative conflict of the piece, or at least of our reception thereto. Do we buy it? Do we accept it with or without irony? Do we even understand it as it is intended? Answering only for myself, I really can’t say.
Schnabel, the weird aesthete, certainly has a way with the camera. His sense of light and space and color (the 13th century sections are deeply saturated, the 20th starkly black and white) imbue his work with artist’s intention, while eschewing overly precious composition. As such, his movies are illuminated by an artistic force that, sometimes to their own detriment, can overpower their efforts at storytelling, but maybe that’s the point. In this case the story at hand, both grittily immediate and impossibly fanciful, would seem to suit the director’s sense of the image in motion, contrasting the contemporary/profane with the ancient/beatific, all heroically lit but photographed in a decidedly modern mode. The juxtaposition is fascinating to observe, while perhaps not entirely effective.
The difficulty inherent in sitting with The Hand of Dante, to me, lies in its refusal to help us contextualize it, which may well be the point. Its abrupt violence, almost cartoonish in situ, never really equals the delicacy with which it approaches Dante’s faith and devotion to art. And so, when the narrative forces those strands to cohere, the result is neither as dissonant nor as harmonious as seems it should be.
So. This thing is big (150 minutes) and sprawling and confrontationally self-contradictory, beautiful to look at but equally frustrating to take in. It isn’t successful in the sense that it answers any of the questions its subtext poses, nor does it seem to enjoy our potential frustration. But it is unrepentantly itself: a pious, heretical examination of the troubling interstices of culture and business across the centuries. That it lacks what feels like a necessary sense of irony may be a failing on the part of the recipient, or a fundamental flaw.
But it’s got Martin Scorsese as an old wizard/cleric with a giant beard, and that’s not nothing. R. 150M. NETFLIX.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Humbuggery in Humboldt, Part 2.