'In the Hand of Dante' Review: Julian Schnabel's Disastrous Divine Comedy About Dante Alighieri Is His 'Megalopolis'

"While I'm not about to declare painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel's career as jettisoned to artistic purgatorio, especially after the radiance and wonder of artist-driven portraits like "Basquiat" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and pieces of "At Eternity's Gate," his decade-in-the-kiln " In the Hand of Dante," which itself spans 70 decades from 14th-century Florence to almost-present-day Venice and New York, is epically miscalculated despite sequences and stretches of grandeur."

"This gargantuan shrine to Dante Alighieri, his "Divine Comedy," and somehow the gangster movie genre, makes a huge misstep in trying to depict in period detail the life and times of Alighieri in the 1300s in chintzily costumed fashion - giving us not one but two Oscar Isaacs who eventually merge in the process but never cohere into a well-articulated character despite the actor's predictably stirring, emotionally mercurial performance."

"He plays two authors: Nick Tosches, who wrote the 2002 source material and died in 2019, and Alighieri, whose legend-has-it original handwritten manuscript for "Divine Comedy" becomes Nick's white whale when he's tasked by John Malkovich (as a sadistic art-coveting crime lord) and Gerard Butler (as a cheesy, closetedly cross-dressing mafioso) to locate it and appraise its inevitably priceless worth."

Julian Schnabel's In the Hand of Dante is a decade-long project that spans from 14th-century Florence to near-present Venice and New York. The film attempts to fuse a monumental homage to Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy with gangster-movie elements and Malickian spiritual ponderance, producing a shaggy, quixotic road-movie feel. Period detail and costuming often read as chintzy while Oscar Isaac portrays two authors who merge yet fail to form a cohesive character. The plot centers on a sought-after original manuscript pursued by menacing crime figures, yielding intermittent grandeur amid miscalculation that alienates audiences.

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