In the Hand of Dante
Julian Schnabel blends a gripping gangster thriller with a plodding Medieval biopic to unexpected and head-scratching ends.
Words to the wise: Martin Scorsese and Oscar Isaac
Image courtesy of Netflix.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri was to the Italian language what Shakespeare has become to the English. Dante’s magnum opus, the epic poem The Divine Comedy, explored the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and transformed the Medieval view of morality. Yet not a word of the manuscript – as written in his own hand – survives. In Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel In the Hand of Dante, a seedy New York writer and Dante expert called Nick Tosches (Oscar Isaac), is approached by a Mafia mobster (John Malkovich) who believes he can lay his hands on the missing manuscript, which in today’s money would be priceless. The latter needs Tosches to confirm the parchment manuscript’s legitimacy – and to secure the relevant paperwork to corroborate its authenticity.
Julian Schnabel’s long and uneven film is many things, a wildly misjudged farce interwoven with moments of bravura filmmaking. Schnabel has divided his story in two, dipping back to Dante’s own days in Italy struggling to come up with his masterwork, which are filmed in colour, with Oscar Isaac playing the poet in his white fitted cap and red hood. Then, in 1998’s Newark, we meet Nick Tosches (Isaac again) mouthing off about the inviolability of his work (“I’d rather see the stable boy fuck my wife than be edited!” he declares). These sequences are filmed in widescreen and in black-and-white, with several actors playing roles in both time periods.
In the American scenes, utilising long takes and close-ups, Schnabel is at his strongest, conjuring up moments of poetic power, reminding us of the filmmaker’s past as a painter in the neo-Expressionist tradition. He is a supreme visualist and with the cast that he has assembled here, he has been wise to allow them their moment in the spotlight. Both Al Pacino and John Malkovich have striking cameos, but it’s Gerard Butler as a blond Italian-American hood who is perhaps the most surprising and compelling. At the outset, he hauls his burly physique into a New York bar where he systematically debases the bar tender, insulting the man’s mother and nonchalantly emptying his wallet before taking him to a back room where he unleashes his greatest humiliation. It’s a scene so raw and so controlled that it will be hard to erase from the memory.
On the other hand, in the scenes set in Medieval Italy, the opposite could be said. Watching Martin Scorsese as a wise old Jew with a white beard so profuse that it could house a flock of starlings, is, quite frankly, mortifying. So are the lines that the poor man has been forced to utter: “A life is but a breeze. Be filled with the scent of the every blade of grass of your soul…and the every moment of life.” That would be a hard line to crack for Mark Rylance, let alone a film director more used to shouting “action!” And then there’s poor Gal Gadot who, at one point, is forced to stand naked in a giant shell replicating Botticelli’s Venus.
There’s all this and more, as the film flits between time frames and colour schemes and screen ratios, with Oscar Isaac looking more and more exasperated as his modern-day incarnation of Dante once again falls for the elusive Beatrice (Gadot), or Giulietta (Gadot). It’s a jumble of the memorable and the forgettable, of the poetic and the excessively brutal, of a gangster thriller set on the mean streets of New York and of a Dan Brown-type page turner filmed on the very thoroughfares (and canals) of Venice, Verona, Padua and Palermo. It’s an ambitious, occasionally inspired and perhaps foolhardy endeavour from an artist who still has the wherewithal to push the boundaries of his artistic medium.
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Louis Cancelmi, Sabrina Impacciatore, Franco Nero, Benjamin Clementine, Paolo Bonacelli, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, Ibrahim Elouahabi.
Dir Julian Schnabel, Pro Gabriele Bebe Moratti, Jon Kilik, Robert F. MacLean, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Olmo Schnabel and Viton Schnabel, Ex Pro Martin Scorsese, Oscar Isaac, Moises Agami, Justin Ardalan-Raikes, Charles M. Barsamian, Matthew Budman, Moises Chiver, Gregory P. Cimino II, Galen Core, Svetlana Dali, Luke Daniels, Konstantin Elkin, Tatiana Emden, Simon Fawcett, Ralph Halek, Matt Hartley, Gena Konstantinakos, Arno Krimmer, Paula P. Manzanedo, Alexander Naas, Michael Paletta, Garrett Patten, Patricio Rabuffetti, Jeff Rice, Leon Salame, Jason Shrier, Aran Thapar and Joyce Zylberberg, Screenplay Julian Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg, Ph Roman Vasyanov, Pro Des Paki Meduri, Ed Marco Spoletini and Louise Kugelberg, Music Benjamin Clementine, Costumes Mariano Tufano, Dialect coaches Ben Shilling and Liz Himelstein.
DreamCrew Entertainment/MeMo Films/Twin Pictures/ArtOfficial Productions-Netflix.
153 mins. Italy/USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 24 June 2026. Cert. 15.
