When the original manuscript of The Divine Comedy emerges in the clutches of a black-market smuggling ring in New York City’s dangerous underbelly, the mob calls weary scholar Nick to authenticate it. Overwhelmed by temptation, Nick defies the mafia and steals the manuscript. As he follows a dark and violent path from a metaphorical Hell into Paradise with his love Giulietta, a parallel tale unfolds: the odyssey of Dante himself, a man who, trapped in a loveless marriage with Gemma and bolstered only by his mentorship under an austere intellectual, escapes to Sicily and creates his masterpiece.
I will undoubtedly bore you with a lengthy essay about this film in the future. I want time to think about it and I want to read the source novel. I liked it a lot, but I need to clear my head to think about whether the film is really that good, or simply something that just resonates me because I love Dante and literature in general, old-fashioned gangster movies, historical mysteries about humanity’s lost treasures, and films filled with surprising cameos from character actors. (Everyone is in this: Malkovich, Pacino, Jason Momoa, Franco Nero – even Marty Scorsese, looking like Dumbledore.) And I like the stars, Oscar Isaac and Gerard Butler. It’s basically a film made for me. So I’ll be back on the subject when I can view it more objectively.
The only performance that I didn’t really care for was that that of Gal Gadot. I suppose I would have been more tolerant of her limited acting skills if she had been more precise in her rendering of Botticelli’s famous painting, which included a fully exposed breast.
Lol. In a Hollywood movie, you’re more likely to see exposed dicks.
The only reason I want to see this is because it is directed by Julian Schnabel. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers.
Botticelli’s Venus is also famously a redhead, but I guess that wouldn’t work with Gal’s natural coloring. The movie sounds interesting, though.
I was in a book club once and someone picked Dante’s Divine Comedy as the next book, and that was the end of that book club.
It’s not exactly light summer reading.