Some films are worth talking about precisely because they don't work. In the Hand of Dante, Julian Schnabel's literary crime epic, arrived on Netflix on June 24 after a theatrical run and a premiere at Venice last fall, and it landed with a thud most critics agree on. It sits in the low 40s on the aggregators, and reviews out of Venice called it bloated, insincere, and a jumbled collision of stories. So the question isn't whether it's good. It's how a film with this much talent and this much ambition ended up here.
The premise alone tells you the reach. Oscar Isaac plays two men across seven centuries: Nick Tosches, the real New York writer whose 2002 novel this adapts, pulled out of grief and self-imposed exile by a mafia boss to authenticate what may be Dante's own handwritten Divine Comedy, and Dante Alighieri himself in the 14th century, searching for the inspiration to write it. Around Isaac, Schnabel assembled a cast that reads like a fever dream: Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese in a rare acting turn as Dante's mentor.
The road here was long enough to become its own story. The project was first announced in 2011, at the height of Schnabel's reputation after The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with Johnny Depp attached to star. It then spent twelve years in development before Isaac replaced Depp and the film finally shot in 2023. Schnabel, the painter who became one of cinema's most distinctive image-makers, was chasing something enormous: art, faith, crime, and creation braided across time.
Why it matters
There's a particular value in a big swing that misses, and it's worth more than another competent film that risks nothing. Schnabel reached for the divine and the criminal in the same breath, tried to make a 14th-century poet and a 21st-century writer rhyme, and could not quite hold it together. Even the harsh reviews credit the ambition. Deadline called it a film that bites off more than it can chew while praising the size of the attempt.
That tension is the reason to pay attention, even to a failure. Cinema this swing-for-the-fences is rare now, and it tends to come from directors who came to film from somewhere else, in Schnabel's case, from painting. A tidy success teaches you nothing. A gorgeous, overreaching wreck full of great actors doing strange work shows you the outer edge of what someone was willing to try. Watch it for that, and decide for yourself where the reach ended and the grasp failed.
In the Hand of Dante is streaming on Netflix.
About this film
