Last September, Julian Schnabel returned to the Venice Film Festival with “In the Hand of Dante,” which screened out of competition in its full, uncut form. Reviews were not good. We now have a trailer, almost a year after the film leaked online, a month before its Venice premiere. The cast is one of the most eclectic of the year: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, and Martin Scorsese.
The 150-minute epic — with Isaac in the lead — is a film Schnabel has been trying to make for more than a decade. Yet he was under pressure from financiers to trim its hefty runtime. For some reason, Netflix acquired the film in March — they will even be giving it a two-week run in theaters; not for Oscar eligibility since the film stinks— so why exactly? Nobody knows.
Last year, Schnabel had contractually agreed to deliver a two-hour, color feature. What he turned in instead was two and a half hours, partly in black-and-white. The ensuing back-and-forth took more than a year, but Schnabel ultimately prevailed. The version that screened at Venice is the one he intended, uncut. No word yet on whether that’s the version that will stream on Netflix.
The big surprise with the Netflix acquisition is the notion that any studio or streamer would watch “In the Hand of Dante” and think the film is a good fit. It’s quite possible that this is part of an overall deal for the streamer to hire Schnabel for another one of their projects. That would make the most sense.
Shot in Rome, “In the Hand of Dante” adapts Nick Tosches’ time-jumping novel, interweaving two storylines: a 14th-century thread with Dante himself, and a modern-day tale of a roguish scholar who defies the mafia while getting caught up in a dangerous manuscript deal.
I found the film to be wildly indulgent, an overstuffed epic that struggles under its own ambition. It is a sprawling 150-minute narrative, swinging between centuries, identities, and genres — including literary drama, gangland violence, and Vatican intrigue. Oscar Isaac, playing both Dante Alighieri and journalist Nick Tosches, is stranded amid the operatic excess, while Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler, both miscast, inhabit confusing dual roles.
Schnabel, best known for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Before Night Falls,” hasn’t directed a film since 2018’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” which also premiered at Venice and earned Willem Dafoe a Best Actor prize and an Oscar nomination.
