Martin Scorsese Recently produced Fox Nation series “The Saints,” But he himself looks more like a biblical figure in a first look at his character from Julian SchnabelS “In the hand of Dante. “Scorsese is bearded and Behisked in this adaptation of Nick Tosche’s book 2002 exclusively below.)
Like the book, Schnabels film will take place both in Italy in the early 1300s, when Dante collects his Magnum Opus, and also in 2001, when a handwritten manuscript that is probably from Dante himself is discovered in the Vatican Library and goes through an elaborate authentication process – with a bully that orders a fictionalized version. Oscar Isaac will play both Dante and Tosches.
Scorsese “Isaiah” will only appear in the 1300s segments. Dante seeks his approval when he writes “Paradiso”, and it takes many visits before Isaiah gives it. Dante was sent to him by Guido Cavalcanti who was his mentor and visits Isaiah when he can for many years while he is in exile. (You can imagine Scorsese’s character from “Quiz Show”, with warm paternity, which addresses Dante as “Young Man.”) Isaiah is supposed to represent the highest form of wisdom.
“In the hand of Dante”, in the lead role in Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino and Franco Nero, will make their world premiere, appropriately enough, at the Venice Festival 2025.
But Cinephiles will particularly tighten against this grizzled image of Scorsese, looks exactly like a font of Renaissance vision that could have inspired the great writer. Scorsese’s actress philography consists largely of Komos or short scenes, but they are always memorable – culminating with his first ever actor, an Emmy nick as a guest actor in “The Studio” this price cycle.
The most memorable can be his sociopathic passengers in “taxi driver” – or rather, as he is credited, passengers who look at silhouette. He asks Robert De Niro’s title character Travis Bickle to pull up in front of an apartment building where he looks at the silhouette of a woman’s dress. He tells Bickle that it is his wife, she is with another man, and in his jealousy he plans to kill her.
Strangely enough, he was able to use the declining threats again for his voice-playing role in the animated comedy in 2004 “Shark Tale” where much of the plot centers on a fish expressed by Will Smith because of Scorse’s heavy eye-brims Puuncherfish money. Somehow, the senses at Dreamworks knew that what Aght’s children wanted to see above all was Martin Scorsese as an underwater gangster. (That movie was also a Venice premiere.)
The thing about the “Shark Tale” performance is that it leans so heavily into Scorsese’s Persona eyebrows, the rapid fire delivery, the somewhat manic vibe that it shows why his actors have had some restrictions. There is a moment at the beginning of his extraordinary document series “A personal journey through American films with Martin Scorsese” (a multi -hour tribute to Scorsese’s favorite movies) that can show why. At the beginning of this, a real -time sketch takes place that takes the form of Scorsese’s profile. It urges the signature profile sketch that is always associated with Alfred Hitchcock – like Hitch before him, Scorsese is a persona and not really elastic enough of one to stretch and fit many roles.
So, just like Hitchcock, Blink-and-miss Cameo has often been Scorsese’s approach in front of the camera: as a photographer in “The Age of Innocence”, says, or as a cameraman in “Hugo.” Of course, there is his speaking part at the end of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, where he plays a radio program host who is just finished giving the radio play version of the story that had developed over the past three and a half hours. It was an incredible meta -comment on how deep human tragedy becomes entertainment, “true crime.” And that he is the one who plays that role, as well as being the film’s director, suggests almost a certain question about how he or he some Filmmakers, could have approached this material as respectfully as possible.
For our money, his biggest screen role is a very unexpected and strange, a real piece of casting against type: his role as Vincent van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” One of the great Japanese director’s most underrated films. This about ten minutes in the anthology, entitled “Crows”, follows a young admirer of the artist who apparently jumps back through time and follows around their idol as they enter landscapes who directly recreat some of van Gogh’s most well -known paintings. Chopin’s “Raindrop” foreplay plays when they go from painting to painting – kind of living the imagination to love a painting so much that you wish you could jump into it and live there a little – while Scorsese van Gogh talks about different things, such as his commitment to his art, which comes through with manic focus and absolute intensity. He explains why he cut off his left ear: it gave him problems while painting a self -portrait, so he got rid of it.
The absolute commitment to art, the feeling of being a leadership for the divinity of creation, feels like it may be what Scorsese comes here as Dante’s mentor in “In the hand of Dante.” It will be exciting to see.
“In The Hand of Dante” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival 2025.
