Imagine having Modigliani sketch your portrait like an amusement park caricaturist. At the time, the customers of the swanky restaurant do not appreciate their good fortune. That is especially true of the maître d,’ who inspires Modigliani’s quick exit through a stained-glass window.
With the police seeking “Modi,” his gallerist/patron Leopold Zborowski encourages him to lay low until he can present his work to Maurice Gangnat, an important collector who could make or break Modigliani’s reputation. However, Modi cannot stop himself from carousing and making scenes with his lowlife painter friends, Maurice Utrillo and Chaim Soutine. Frankly, Modi only relaxes when in the company of his hot-and-cold lover, journalist Beatrice Hastings.
Even Modi recognizes his fatalism can be self-defeating. Unfortunately his failing health often leads to fits of depression. He largely masks his worsening condition, but visions of plague doctors constantly reminds him of his own mortality.
Don’t call Johnny Depp canceled. He is alive and well and working in Europe. He and Woody Allen really ought to get together. Regardless, he seems perfectly happy appearing in idiosyncratic festival bait. Nevertheless, the chance to helm a period production is an opportunity that rarely comes around for any actor, so he made the most of it.
Modi is visually bold and sometimes even experimental. In addition to his dramatic camera angles and whirling pans, Depp often renders scenes in the style of vintage black-and-white silent cinema, even utilizing title cards for dialogue. He also employs an anachronistic soundtrack, including avant-garde jazz and Tom Waits.
Depp also benefits from a quality cast, especially including Ricardo Scamarcio, who broods like a house on fire as Modi. Ironically, Scamarcio bears a resemblance to both the real-life Modigliani and Depp himself (who never appears in an acting role), so viewers might start to think of all three interchangeably. Of course, Al Pacino does his thing, chewing the scenery as Gangnat, while Stephen Graham provides some semblance of a stable human perspective as Zborowski.
Sometimes Depp’s go-for-broke execution turns into unrestrained excess. Yet, he still has pacing issues with a saggy mid-section. Nevertheless, his adventurousness is impressive. This is his first feature directorial gig since 1997’s The Brave, which was born into infamy at Cannes but has since appreciated critically, despite Depp never allowing an American release. Maybe it is time for a second (or rather first) look. In any event, his latest is probably much better than you have probably heard (if you have heard at all). Recommended with a good deal of enthusiasm for patrons of Kunstlerroman cinema, Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness is now playing in New York, at the Quad.
