Slate Magazine69%
Netflix’s Star-Studded Dante Movie Is Infernal 51%
By Laura Miller59%
6/26/2026, 10:16:32 AM
Topics: Film Review, Book Adaptation
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Pessimism Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 74.2% saturation with 595 hits. Analysis detected 1,803 faulty-reasoning hits from 802 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.5% and a BS Rank of 51% (10,871 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 50.30% of the article peer group.
In the Hand of Dante, Julian Schnabel’s new movie for Netflix, is a beautifully shot mess, with as many starry cameos as there are candied cherries in a fruitcake.
Oscar Isaac, the lead, plays two roles, as does Gal Gadot, the love interest of both of Isaac’s characters, and as does Gerard Butler, who’s cast as both a brutal, grouchy hit man and Pope Boniface VIII.
The supporting cast includes Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Jason Momoa (in a gigantic Panama hat and ice cream suit), and John Malkovich.
Either someone cashed in a <em>lot</em> of favors to get these people on board or nobody bothers to read scripts these days.
The premise (of both novel and movie) sounds like the makings of a Dan Brown–style thriller: A writer named Nick Tosches gets enlisted by some mobsters to authenticate a manuscript stolen from the Vatican archives that may be the original draft of <em>The Divine Comedy</em>, written by Dante Alighieri himself.
Anyone expecting a fast-paced corker full of secret codes, hidden compartments, and chases down rain-slicked cobblestone streets, however, will be disappointed.
The film, like the novel, jumps between 2001 and the 14<sup>th</sup> century, where it follows Dante’s life around the time that he began writing his masterpiece.
Both the Nick Tosches character and Dante are played by Isaac, suggesting a bold comparison between the two writers that doesn’t hold much water.
Tosches, for all his talent, subscribed to a vein of American culture I call the Anxious Masculine.
In a society that idolizes pioneers, cowboys, and self-made tycoons, this mindset fears that creative pursuits like writing, acting, or painting are unmanly.
It’s essential, therefore, for men who do this work to emphatically demonstrate how (as Depp puts it) “ballsy” they are by drinking a lot, getting into fistfights, and treating women in a cavalier fashion, as well as by writing about men who do the same.
For his part, Tosches worshipped the Italian American gangsters he grew up among in Newark, New Jersey, and they often appear in his novels as stoic fatalists imparting nuggets of flinty wisdom.
The film version of <em>In the Hand of Dante</em> features an operatic but unconvincing heterosexual love story, but the true heart of the story comes early on, when the Tosches character wins a nod of acceptance and approval from Butler’s sociopathic hit man for refusing to extinguish his cigarette during their private flight to Italy.
This—does it even need to be said?—is not how Dante himself saw it.
The movie follows the novel in trying to reimagine the epic poet, with his elaborately delineated categories of sin and very medieval desire to impose order on the chaos of the world, as a rebellious 19<sup>th</sup>-century Romantic poet, all unruly passion and pagan wildness.
While the Tosches character in both novel and film rants about the inauthenticity of the publishing world, with its outrageous expectation that his work should be edited, the historical Dante played the game.
He was an elected politician embroiled in a bitter sectarian power struggle who depended for his livelihood—after his side lost and he was driven into exile—on pleasing aristocratic patrons.
Many of the individuals depicted suffering the torments of the damned in <em>Inferno</em> were people who, in Dante’s view, had done him dirty.
Also—and this <em>really</em> shouldn’t need to be said—Dante was a devout enough Catholic to produce a 14,233-line exegesis on the Christian afterlife.
Although his close friend Guido Cavalcanti got in trouble for his atheistic beliefs, there’s no evidence at all that Dante himself rejected the faith or the church’s authority.
Similarly, Tosches (the fictional version, but apparently also the real-life writer) wanted to believe that the poet ended up feeling “caged” in by the terza rima form he chose for the verse in the <em>Divine Comedy</em>, because Tosches himself viewed constraining structures as oppressive.
This amounts to a catastrophic failure at imagining himself into the hierarchy-obsessed mindset of the Middle Ages, a way of thinking about the world that Dante, with his numbered circles of Hell, as tidy as a wall of post-office boxes, clearly shared.
The contemporary scenes in <em>In the Hand of Dante</em> are a shade more convincing, but it remains hard to believe that any gangster would launch a clearly expensive rare-document operation using some random writer as an authenticator.
Isaac spouts a lot of impressive-sounding palaver about vellum types and radiocarbon dating, but he handles the presumably priceless pages with his bare hands instead of the de rigueur white cotton gloves required by archivists.
By the time the movie resorts to a dream sequence in which Gadot appears naked on a clamshell hovering over the ocean à la Botticelli’s Venus, the entire film has become so silly that the only thing to do between yawns is laugh.
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