The Brooklyn Rail

Julian Schnabel’s new movie, In the Hand of Dante, double-casts both literally and figuratively, separating its narrative doubleness into technicolor and black and white.  A full 120 minutes of story, and not one of them dull. The color part (with a pallet courtesy the Arena Chapel of Giotto) is a historical biopic about Dante and his wife, how he fell in love with young Beatrice at age nine, then wrote the second and third parts of his famous poem while living with Can Grande, after the mounful death of young Beatrice, and later of his poet-friend Cavalcante. So the colored history film.
 
The black and white flick is a modern film noir story about how a future lover of Dante's poem became a man at about age nine and thereafter a highly literate criminal who gets drawn into a plot to steal the only manuscript copy of the Commedia in Dante’s own hand.  Despite the back-and-forth cutting (clued by subtitles), the film is manifestly a continuous narrative, sustained by our curiosity about the manuscript’s past, our surprise at the turn that puts the manuscript into the Dante-figure’s own hands, and by the suspense about its future – the fate of both the manuscript and its all-too-mortal keepers.    
 
The degenerate who is the film’s faux-Dantesque protagonist bears the same name as the author of that novel on which Director Schnabel’s bases his film.  (Shades of “John Self” in Martin Amis’s Money.)  The germ of the Toches’s novel on which the film is based is surely the curious, mouldy tale in Boccaccio’s Life of Dante that the missing final cantos of the great poem were found by Dante’s son Jacobo behind a wall in a church to which he was directed by his late father in a dream.  The missing cantos happen to reify a Jacob’s Ladder that in effect boosts Dante to the stellatum, or Fixed Stars.  The modern Dante look-alike from Newark dreams of going to the same place.  
 
Early in the movie its protagonist is seen struggling to climb a precipitous cliff over the sea; it is above a porch-like stairway, and much later in the movie the same protagonist is imagined asDante’s Ulysses asking how he can ever climb out of the depths. These are the symbolic and psychic poles of the present Dantesque narrative, the pilgrim who climbs the purgatorial mount to reunite with Beatrice (his great and sponsoring love) in a figural Eden, and the damned adventurer—Ulysses—who gets himself drowned way beyond his depth. But the modern Dante is apparently the antithesis of Homer’s original Odysseus, who makes it home to his wife and exacts vengeance on her loutish and tormenting suitors.

The back-story is this:  a priest in the 19th Century Vatican (placed there by his once murderous Sicilian patron) finds and purloins the manuscript, which eventually ends up back in his home in Sicily.  A lot of stealing and shooting goes on in this movie, to say the least, plus those phantasmagoric intervals in which the murderous modern-time protagonist identifies with the purgatorial Dante.  But although we know who is pulling the trigger throughout this trigger-happy movie, we are often unclear as to who is pulling the strings.  It is not the futuristic Mister Big of a typical James Bond entertainment, it is instead someone or something behind the behind, as if the trouble were the conspiracy of history itself.  That trouble includes a history of vendetta.  Of course there was vendetta in Dante’s Italy too, which is reflected in his epochal poem.  His original dream-vision is freighted with history, and negotiated by time-travel across that history:  to satisfy justice, but also to settle scores.  
 
“Toches” is recruited to take possession of a lost manuscript in the hand of the poet Dante, whose poem and biography “Toches” happens to know by heart.  He will soon be working for a professional art thief, but possession is only one tenth of his illegal enterprise because authentication of the recovered manuscript is required by Nick’s criminal associates. The first of these is the wizened and preternaturally foul-mouthed hit man, a cynical and vicious debt-collector for Mob loan sharks.  After murdering a thievish deadbeat about to give him a blowjob, Lou the Enforcer is kept very busy as cleanup man throughout the front half of the film, until the protagonist (whom he is cleaning up after) turns around and murders him:  But the film’s principal thieves, unwilling to leave any trace of their presence in the film’s bibliographic paradises even commit the Umberto Eco-like murder of the librarians.  Only the technicians running the giant carbon dating machine needed to verify the text’s authenticity escape death.  Murdering them would killing the golden goose (STEM apparently trumps the Humanities).  
 
Meanwhile, "Nick Toches"  has decided, almost ecstatically, to take possession of the manuscript entirely for himself. But although Nick has found the manuscript, it now has also found him. And duly taken possession. The scene in which he assassinates his erstwhile criminal employers is his drama’s turning point.  Thieves steal from thieves.  “Toches,” or Nick, whose story this now truly becomes, also has a history. He began his life of crime as a young boy, by killing a menacing, knife-wielding kid, a stranger in his neighborhood. The deeply worried young killer is vicariously exonerated by an aged father figure. Much later, “Toches,” no longer a child, has fallen into the smug and manipulative clutches of Joe Black, a sophisticated fencer of stolen art. He is played by John Malkovich with all the impudence and insouciance that the famous actor has brought to a history of memorable performances long preceding the present one.  Could this be the famous actor’s final bow?
 
Nick’s early guide, as played by Al Pacino (seeming to forgive himself, for long ago playing Michale Corleone). has been replaced by one Isaac, played by erstwhile Mafia movie-maker Martin Scorcese.  Isaac is a stand-in for Dante’s Virgil, the mentor who cannot go the distance with his charge, but gets him through infernal ice and purgatorial fire to his rendezvous with Beatrice. Isaac is associated in the film’s imagery with stairs:  Dante’s Virgil climbs the stair-like terraces of Purgatory, but ultimately falls off its ladder, by returning to the Limbo from which he was summoned to guide the pilgrim to Beatrice in the first place.

In any case, with Mister Not-So-Big-After-All out of the way, Nick now has the prize to himself.  But to cover up his tracks he also has left two dead Italian librarians.  This “coincidence” attracts unwanted Mafia attention, and a new murderous gang emerges. Thus the saga’s real origins -- in a Homeric vendetta in a town in 19th century Sicily, with its town square littered with the shooting victims of the youth who will become the peaceable local capo -- have cast the shadow of their crude ethos into even the small-time fraud and violence in a dumpy modern Newark, haunted by the likes of the loathsome, arrogant, and pitiless Mob enforcer Lou. 
 
Eventually identified and captured by the Mafia, Nick only survives a Crucifixion-like agony because a woman armed with both the manuscript and a gun shoots the merciless torturer.  Her only reward comes when Nick shoots her in return. This leaves Nick alone with the Beatrice-figure of both Dante and Toches. But Beatrice, we remember, turns away from Dante’s love in favor of God’s.  As played by Gail Gadol, the auteur’s new Beatrice remains earth-bound, and appears to be pregnant, like Dante’s wife of yore.  Love is reborn to the accompaniment of a campy tableau of Botticelli’s of “Birth of Venus”:  the noire film has now switched to color. 
 
So to what fantasy island and tropical paradise will the survivor and his inamorata now escape?  Which of Dante’s ten heavens? Nick’s adolescence begins with the reverie of contemplating those heavens to a recitation of the ending of the Paradiso, and the movie’s ending points us towards some skyey plateau of eternal beatitude. We do not know if this is a vision vision—or a wish-fulfillment fantasy—or if it is the story’s actual happy ending. Dante the narrator never tells us what happens to Dante the historical person, after he comes back to earth, because he never tells us if his poem is to be understood as a post-mortem narration or just the record of a dream-vision. 
 
In the middle of his life, Schnabel’s doubled protagonist’s temporal existence changes definitively:  Dante was converted to eternity, while Toches is merely converted to love.  But of course there can be a plausible analogy between these two transformations and their objects. And that analogy seems to dawn on us at about the point in the movie where the black and white noire flick turns into those colors out of Giotto.  Or maybe this is just that grateful coloration afforded by rose-colored glasses.  For this also the point where the vendetta of history emerges in Nick’s plan to escape the Mafia by faking his own death as a missing victim of the destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan on 9-11.

The novel by the real-life Nick Toches allows the historical Dante a vision of his earthly end, as per the prospective-retrospective axis of our theorizing here. It is a historical fiction, after all, and Dante died like the rest of us; whereas the Commedia is more like science fiction, defined as historical fiction run in the other direction. The movie and the novel are much more ambiguous and evasive than the famous poem, regarding the future of Nick Toches (who should be found among the snakes in Inferno XXV).  Will he perhaps expire quietly on his colorful Utopian vacation island, and not outdoors in the dark with the howling wolf and the desolate black and white moon?  
 
How can I finish writing my life if I’m still alive? Gines de Passamonte asks, in Part II of Don Quixote. We may guess Toches’s persona could be asking his audience the same somewhat rhetorical or self-answering question.  None of us knows exactly how our life-movie will end.  But to judge by Julian Schnabel’s latest film, only rarely will it end altogether well.