In the Hand of Dante is all over the place. The narrative advertised by its title, of medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s struggle to write his epic poem, The Divine Comedy, competes for screen time with a neo-noir story in which a fictional version of Nick Tosches, the late author of the book on which this film is based, is recruited by a crime boss to authenticate the poem’s long-lost original manuscript.
Oscar Isaac plays both Dante and Tosches. Gerard Butler stars as an unpredictable, “I woke up and chose violence” hitman who accompanies Tosches to Italy, as well as Pope Boniface VIII, who exiles Dante from his native Florence. (The two belonged to opposing factions vying for control of the great Italian city-state, with Dante supporting civic independence from papal rule.)
The crime boss is John Malkovich. Every once in a while, Jason Momoa wanders around in a white suit and fedora, and Martin Scorsese—this time in front of the camera rather than behind it—wears a comically large beard.
At some points, the film moves at the lightning pace of Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street. At others, it slows down for the kinds of drawn-out stalemates and banal, meandering conversations (about the nature of beauty, about “broads” picking up dog poop) that feel more at home in a Tarantino film.
At the very least, the film’s sheer bizarreness keeps things interesting, which is more than I can say about one of Schnabel’s previous films, At Eternity’s Gate, about the life, death, and afterlife of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.
That film amounted to little more than a by-the-numbers biopic, one that made you feel no closer to the man than those 3D virtual experiences you seem to find in almost every major city nowadays.
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Schnabel doesn’t manage to get particularly close to Dante either. Sure, Isaac looks the part, with his sour face and that historical outfit that looks very much like pajamas. (I never noticed the similarities between Dante and Scrooge; whether or not A Christmas Carol was indeed inspired by The Divine Comedy is apparently a subject of intense scholarly debate.)
Ultimately, though, Isaac is playing Dante as he is immortalized, not as he really might have been. If Schnabel’s point is that it’s impossible to know the real Dante, that’s fine. However, this does not seem to be the case.
Yes, we are told that despite his literary fame, we have no surviving handwriting from him, and we don’t ever find out if the manuscript is truly the real deal (though correct me if I’m wrong—the film is, as said, rather confusing at times).
At the same time, the two parallel stories, with their overlapping casts, seem to imply that there is some kind of direct, supernatural connection between Dante’s time and ours, as well as between his life experiences and Tosches’, down to Tosches experiencing unexplained moments of déjà vu while treading in the poet’s faded footsteps.
Though certainly more ambitious than At Eternity’s Gate from a formal standpoint, In the Hand of Dante is no richer in terms of substance. This is felt most evidently during the film’s emotional climax, where Dante experiences an epiphany that allows him to finish his poem.
What is this epiphany? Essentially, Dante’s bearded poetry teacher—that’s Scorsese—tells him to get his head out of his ass and “be in the present moment.” That’s not an exact quote, but it might as well be.
The frustrating thing is that the blueprint for a more interesting story is already here—one that deals not only with the poem itself but also its status in modern culture, which tends to value Inferno above all others (Of the 135 famous engraved illustrations created by French artist Gustave Doré, more than half were devoted to Inferno. And more recently, a popular video game adaptation of the poem ends before Dante makes it to Purgatory.)
The film is a story about Dante, after having composed Inferno without breaking a sweat, struggling to write Purgatory and Paradise, and wrestling with the fact that, despite his faith as a Christian and gifts as a poet, he cannot picture heaven even though he has no trouble imagining hell. It’s the story of a man returning to the light and seeing love and beauty where, before, he couldn’t.
Dante had a lot on his mind when he began working on the poem. First, he remained greatly saddened by the death of Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine woman with whom he had been in love since childhood but never married. She passed away in 1290 around the age of 24.
Then, as mentioned, there was the matter of his exile. In Dante’s time, Tuscan politics was divided between two rival factions: the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs, the former of which fought to limit papal control over Florence. While Dante, a White Guelph, left to negotiate with Boniface, the Black Guelphs seized control of the city, condemning the poet to exile.
Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven resembles his journey through life. At the beginning of the poem, the poet describes himself as being lost in a dark forest, an obvious metaphor for his being at rock bottom, not knowing where to go or what to do with himself.
Along the way, Dante encounters and passes judgment on many of his contemporaries. Dante condemns Boniface—who coerced his way into the papacy and used his papal powers to shape worldly politics—to hell before the former has yet died. Beatrice, the paradigm of innocence and virtue, welcomes Dante to Paradise.
In the Hand of Dante is best when it interrogates the poet’s attempt to interpret Christianity’s theology and doctrines as he sees fit. One of the most thought-provoking scenes in the entire film takes place near the beginning, when a 10-year-old-or-so Tosches walks up to his uncle and tells him he just murdered another kid out in the street, ostensibly in self-defense.
Child Tosches asks if he should confess his sins at church. His uncle shakes his head, offering a curiously un-Catholic argument: God, he says, hears everything, meaning he already heard this confession just now. What good can come from talking to a priest?
Given the guilt that Tosches feels later in life, and the mess that this guilt gets him into (like Dante, he builds up a wall between himself and the woman who loves him, played in both timelines by Gal Gadot), one wonders if it would have been better for him to talk to someone after all. At least, someone other than his uncle.
Despite these and other redeeming qualities present in In the Hand of Dante, Schnabel has once again left me thinking of films that did a better job capturing the art or artists at their center.
Despite these and other redeeming qualities present in In the Hand of Dante, Schnabel has once again left me thinking of films that did a better job capturing the art or artists at their center.
At this moment, the first such film that comes to mind is Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s son and the similar-sounding play that may have been inspired by his passing.
Where At Eternity’s Gate and In the Hand of Dante place art and artists in service of their own stories, Hamnet is the other way around: It places the story in service of understanding and appreciating the play.
The film’s final act, set almost exclusively on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, lingers on several key scenes from Hamlet, which the viewer—after seeing the biographical context that shaped Shakespeare—is able to see in a new and, in my own case, more revealing light.
I wish In the Hand of Dante had done the same thing, but for the Divine Comedy. For as much as the historical part of the film focuses on Dante’s creative process, we hardly get to hear (let alone reconsider) any lines from the poem itself. While Dante the historical figure speaks, Dante the poet remains as silent as his statues.
Tim Brinkhof is a U.S.-based Dutch journalist who writes about religion, politics, and history.
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