In the Hand of Dante

The result is unlike any movie you’ll see and listen to this summer, a grand overeach with indulgences that will make you grimace even as they give you access to the fertile creative mind of poets, painters, actors and a filmmaker who gets it even if he sometimes struggles to help us get it with him.

The combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art provide enough energy and enjoyment to power the first two-thirds of this long film. But in the end it flags, and it’s as if the outrageous black comedy has to be paid for with solemn romantic fantasy. But what a performance from Butler.

While “In the Hand of Dante” never finds the consistency that eludes it, it is a film that sparks in individual beats.

The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary.

Nothing can stop this overlong and disastrously ill-judged project from flying off the rails.

Dante’s major work included “Inferno,” where he described nine circles of hell. An eternity spent in any of them would be more enjoyable than this heavy-handed hot mess.

The film director creates the sensation for viewers of being dragged through the various levels of hell across the course of 2.5 turgid hours, riddled with incomprehensible dialogue, baffling accents and some of the most egregious continuity in recent film history.

In the Hand of Dante is a strange, ambitious, excessive and very uneven film. It is watchable, because it has striking images, a remarkable cast and a mixture of literary thriller, spiritual journey, mafia story, art, religion and imagined biography that at least sparks curiosity. But it is also very obvious that the film wants to seem deeper, more cultured and more important than it finally is.Everything starts with a supposed original manuscript of The Divine Comedy, which connects the present-day story with Dante’s own life. On one side is Nick Tosches, a New York writer caught in a criminal plot around the manuscript. On the other is Dante Alighieri himself, in the middle of a vital and spiritual process tied to the creation of his work. The idea is powerful: crossing two time periods, two searches, two men haunted by love, beauty, death and the divine. The problem is that the film wants to cover so much that it often ends up getting lost inside itself.Julian Schnabel does not make a small or discreet film. Quite the opposite: In the Hand of Dante always aims big. It wants to be furious, artistic, spiritual, gangster-like, poetic, dirty, cultured and visionary all at once. At times, that mixture has a certain magnetism. Some scenes work through sheer strangeness, through the presence of the actors or through the sense that you are watching something that does not look like a conventional streaming film. In that sense, it is refreshing that it is not a flat or factory-made product.Oscar Isaac holds the double game between Tosches and Dante fairly well. He has presence, intensity and a clear ability to move between the earthly and the tormented. The cast is also so striking that part of the film’s appeal is easy to understand: John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Martin Scorsese... There is almost a sense of a parade of appearances, as if the film wanted to build its own hell, purgatory and paradise of **** the whole thing never quite fits together. The film has interesting moments, even hypnotic ones, but also heavy, confusing and rather pretentious passages. Sometimes it feels like a literary road movie. Sometimes like a gangster film. Sometimes like a spiritual meditation on Dante. Sometimes like a cult fantasy too fascinated with itself. The problem is not that it is strange; the problem is that it does not always turn that strangeness into emotion, clarity or real **** tone also weighs heavily. In the Hand of Dante talks about love, death, art, faith, redemption and beauty, but sometimes it does so with such solemnity that it ends up sounding more important than it feels. There is a difference between being a complex film and behaving all the time as if you were saying something enormous. Here, too often, the ambition is more visible than the result.Visually, it does have strength. Schnabel knows how to create images, atmospheres, faces and moments of aesthetic intensity. The film may be excessive and messy, but it is not anonymous. It has personality. Even when it becomes a little boring, even when it turns verbose or self-indulgent, there is something in it that prevents you from dismissing it as a simple disaster. It is flawed, but not dead. Wrong, but **** the Hand of Dante is a film you can watch, especially if you accept its strangeness and excess from the start. It is not a marvel, not by any means, and its attempt to rise toward the intellectual and the spiritual often remains more pose than substance. But it is not a vulgar film either. It has ambition, images, actors and moments of genuine attraction. The problem is that it wants to reach Dante’s paradise and too often remains wandering through a rather confusing purgatory.

Julian Schnabel was originally known as a painter, then later found success as a film director. His latest movie let’s his artistic tendencies overshadow his filmmaking skills. The story is told in two periods. In modern day, Oscar Isaac plays a poet who goes on a quest to find the original manuscript for Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” This could have been a compelling crime drama on its own, but then there’s the other story. It features Isaac as Dante struggling to write his famous work. These sections drag the film down with too much pretentious, poetic dialogue. In some of the more unusual casting choices, Schnabel has Gerard Butler as a crude, brutal hit man, Jason Momoa as a quiet detective and Martin Scorsese in a giant gray beard and flowing wig speaking in an uncharacteristically show manner. In a switch on the traditional concept, the modern scenes are black and white, while the period footage is in color (with English subtitles even though it’s in English). At 2.5 hours, this endeavor tries patience. While there are moments that work, the flashback segments drag down the whole thing to create an ostentatious mess.