I didn’t hate Julian Schnabel‘s In The Hand of Dante, which I caught a night or two ago, or at least I didn’t hate it altogether. But it did make me groan here and there, and it instilled anguished feelings…spasms of revulsion and disgust and disorientation. I literally said out loud “oh, God…oh, no…oh, Jesus” during a ridiculous mass-murder scene.
And I felt heartbroken that poor Oscar Isaac had committed to playing the dual lead role (a fictional wise-guy version of Tosches as well as the real, actual Dante Alighieri), and I felt so sickened by Gerard Butler‘s coarse, poseur-level performance as Louie, the hit man, that — BIG-ASS SPOILER WARNING! — I was overjoyed when Louie finally got plugged. “Good!” I said to myself, “and please burn in hell.”
Something is very wrong when a film by a director you’ve respected and admired for the better part of 30 years (Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and At Eternity’s Gate are Schnabel’s best)…something is very, very wrong when his latest initially excites and delights and fills you with hope and even wonder, and then, in the space of less than 20 or 25 minutes, makes you feel like you’ve dropped some really bad acid.
No, I haven’t read Nick Tosches’ same-titled source novel, but I know Tosche’s hipster prose style pretty well (I’m a huge fan of “Hellfire” and “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams“) and…how to put this?…as I watched Schnabel’s film I was saying to myself “This is wrong, man…the crude, porno-violent pistol murders are way over the top…this isn’t the Tosches I know or want to know.”
Tosches’ 2002 novel was co-adapted by Schnabel and wife Louise Kugelberg, and this fact alone is somber testimony, you bet…proof, even, that fortifying a marriage by working on a movie script together is not, in and of itself, a good idea, for the lurching between delirious madman poetry and black-and-white bullets slamming into craniums and chest cavities is my idea of godawful.
I guess I’m now obliged to finally read Tosches’ 2002 book, a trippy, semi-fictional dream saga with the same title, but how could Tosches have written such a thing? There’s no question that Schnabel and Kugelberg have desecrated Tosches’ legacy here.
I can only tell you that walkouts began early on in the Sala Darsena, and that I was cringing and flinching and almost writhing in agony.
Butler is now 55 and way overweight, and the ridiculous “Louie” smokes like a mentally-deranged chimney. Butler reminded me a bit of Orson Welles‘ Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (’58), not in terms of Welles’ obesity (Butler is merely bloated by way of a pig diet) but in terms of his character’s perversity…theatrical, random-ass, sub-mental, dumb-fuck cruelty.
Born and raised in Scotland, Butler’s natural accent is soft and gentle and charming, but of course he’s been speaking with a fake, tough-guy patois all these years…what a shame.
HE to friendo a couple of hours after Dante ended: “Tosches’ semi-fictional book of the same title can’t be as vulgarly, bruisingly violent as the film is, not to mention gven to such wildly florid trip=outs and generally lost in its own psychedelic fantasy scenario. It starts well but within the first half-hour there’s a noticable absence of taste and discretion. It’s occasionally just plain awful. Okay, Martin Scorsese’s bushy-bearded cameo is a hoot, and Al Pacino has a good scene with a very young Tosches early on. But the shootings are so plentiful and thoughtless and grotesque…beyond repulsive.”
