The Brooklyn Rail

Julian Schnabel’s new film, based on Nick Tosches’s 2002 novel of the same name brings into existence something critics have wondered about since antiquity: a tragicomedy. The term has been tossed around for ages, but few authors have tried to produce this paradox. Schnabel has found a way, and his transformation of Tosches hard-boiled crime fiction into a genuine work of art constitutes a position paper on what it means to be an artist in 2025.  Schnabel asks us to join him in his minute dissection of the artistic sensibility, that is, what makes the artist different from others and, often, from himself.

In other words, he embarks on an exploration of multiple identities, how one person can be simultaneously two people. Let’s start by considering Dante Alighieri, one of the main characters here. Dante, a child of nine, falls into mad love with another child, Beatrice. How does a child, a being still unformed, fall in love with another child? The absurdity of puppy love is that in this case it brands the lover forever. Dante would always be madly in love with Beatrice, but who or what is she? In herself, she is nothing. Dante chronicles his love for her in the Vita nuova, but it is his love; about her we learn nothing except that she dies young. Dante however has a wife, Gemma, who is a person, one who shares the tribulations of Dante’s exile, who bears his children. Does Dante love Gemma? He does as a man, but the artist Dante is in love with Beatrice, the creation of his mind.

Schnabel brilliantly recreates the moment when Dante first sees Beatrice, an angelic child, but immediately moves forward in Dante’s life of political activism and exile. Beatrice is the artist’s point of departure: he must suffer the pangs of unrequited love and even pursue her image beyond the grave. At the end of the second book of the Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, Dante reaches the earthly paradise, where he meets Beatrice. Not a reunion of lovers but a repudiation of earthly love: Beatrice is a soul whose existence consists of adoring God and rebukes Dante for even thinking of her as a woman. The artist may pursue his ideal, but he can never possess it.

Dante’s only consolation is his art, made possible by his narcissistic love of Beatrice. He must do to himself what he has already done to her: make himself into a character, a fiction, an act Tosches repeats. So, Dante, the man must become Dante the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy. To become the author, he must subject himself to rigorous discipline, in effect, becoming enthralled to another woman, Sophia, or wisdom. This process Schnabel turns into a voyage of discovery, with his Dante encountering a Jewish sage, Jacob, who lives in a tower. Climbing up the stairway is Schnabel’s version of Jacob’s ladder, an ascent to greater knowledge. Only when he his armed with wisdom and the discipline of art—how to control language by forcing it into the terza rima of his great poem—will Dante be a true artist.

On the banal level, where we enter the film, discipline is personified by a thug, a Mafia enforcer, who brings delinquent debtors into line. His rules are implacable: if you do not pay back the loan shark, you suffer. Or rather, someone you love suffers for you since too much suffering, death, would void the loan. Schnabel develops the idea of multiple identities by having his actors play multiple roles: the murderous thug in black-and-white Newark will reappear in technicolor as the pope who sends Dante into exile. But this character is of great importance: his disregard for human life reminds us that the artist must subordinate everything in his life to art. Dante must leave Gemma to shift for herself while he pursues knowledge.

The energy that weaves all these strands together is money, the driving force. When a gangster discovers that there exists a Dante manuscript, he sends our loan shark and a young author name Tosches obsessed with Dante off to Italy to secure it. They find the manuscript, murder the owner and anyone else who might identify them and return to sunny New Jersey. The author points out that while they have the manuscript, they must secure verification of the strictest scientific sort—carbon dating for example. This sets our author, the actor also plays the part of Dante, on yet another quest: he must steal documents produced at the same time Dante wrote his manuscript to verify paper age and ink quality. This he does. The manuscript is now ready for metamorphosis: it will become cash in the same way art, despite its mystical origins, eventually becomes a commodity.

But, as in Dante, love has a way of intruding into crime. Our author falls in love with a woman; the actress also plays the role of Dante’s wife Gemma and decides to keep the manuscript for himself. To do this, he must murder his accomplices and escape the clutches of the original owners. This he does, and he and the mysterious Gemma figure live, presumably, happily ever after.

So, what Schnabel teaches us by transfiguring Tosches’s sordid text into visual magic is that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice. Dante must allow his family to suffer for him to produce his great poem. He himself must suffer exile and privation. The thieves who want to turn his manuscript into gold unleash diabolic forces in their metaphorical alchemy: those powers are only satisfied with blood. At best, the happily-ever-after ending is provisional, a present time that may fade and die. Schnabel breathes a sigh and says, yes, to produce a work of art we must realize we are both artists and human beings, that we can make nothing without giving up something else. Tragicomedy is bittersweet: how could it be otherwise?