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Johnny Depp’s bohemian fantasy starts at full throttle, with the artist Amelio Modigliani (Riccardo Scamarcio) breaking up the Café Dome, then exiting on a trolley straight through their stained glass window, smashing the Art Nouveau rosebuds to bits while still clutching an ice bucket with a souvenired bottle of champagne in it. A waiter pursues him through the smashed window, brandishing a meat cleaver. Seeing the knife, the gendarmes arrest him; Modi is home free.
As an art happening, it’s the kind of thing that is a thousand times more fun in the retelling than it would have been for the people picking glass out of their hair, let alone the ones who had to sweep up the mess afterwards. Of course, they’re just the little people. Life as an impoverished artist wasn’t really an endless romp, either. Modi, as the film calls him, looks gleeful for the camera as he fends off an assailant with a baguette, but he was already dying by degrees; his titanic drinking and drug consumption was not so much a quest for legendary status as DIY painkilling. On the wing of madness, indeed. It’s a romantic idea of the artistic life, a teenage dream of extremes — but hey, here’s Johnny. Punk rock lives.
Just to be clear, Modi is not the terrible muddle of self-aggrandizement that was widely expected — not all of it, anyway. It has some beautifully assembled rough-and-tumble set pieces (including the stained-glass explosion). There is a central romantic relationship (with poet and critic Beatrice Hastings, played by Antonia Desplat) portrayed as volatile but alive with shared jokes and banter — a relationship between equals — which is still depressingly rare to see between men and women in Movieworld.
And, for a special treat, there is a stand-out scene with Al Pacino, playing a moneyed collector who tries and fails to whittle down Modi’s ego. It was actually Pacino who first had the idea to direct a film based on Dennis McIntyre’s play Modi more than 25 years ago, then suggested Depp should do it. As collector Maurice Gangnat, Pacino is able to suggest a vast hinterland of commercial acumen, moral equivocation and the plutocrat’s place in the art world. He does this with the twitch of an eyebrow or a lowered gaze: tiny, perfect gestures. What it is to see a maestro at work.
In between, though – and there is so much in-between — come the jarring, repetitive rants by Modi and his mates about how great their art is, celebrations of excess (another bottle! And another! ) and dialogue that works like polystyrene stuffing, filling the cracks with Modi’s half-baked musings on the happy lives of pigeons or long quotes from Charles Baudelaire, poet and patron saint of dissipation. There is also a good deal of tiresome comic business between Modi and his similarly talented but unsuccessful friends, Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaim Soutine (Ryan McParland).
Utrillo has spent a lot of time in asylums, he tells us; Soutine, who is so revoltingly dirty that his only regular companions are flies, probably should. The trio’s pratfalls and pranks are shot in black and white to look like unrestored scraps of silent films, like the Left Bank’s answer to the Three Stooges: they only just stop short of slapping each other’s heads. As it is, Utrillo and Soutine play a game with their own saliva that turns even Modi’s stomach; Scamarcio, who intermittently leans into the kind of clowning Johnny Depp has explored himself as an actor, makes the most of the yucky bits. It takes ages, for example, for Modi to pick a dead fly off Soutine’s grubby face, screwing up his nose as he does it. Enough already! The point is well labored.
The director has made a point of saying this is not a biopic, just an imagining of three days in Modigliani’s life. With no claim to biographical exactitude, it can mix up dates; the film is set at the beginning of the First World War, but Modigliani only met the dealer given an unflattering portrait here, Léopold Zborowski (an excellent and engaging Stephen Graham) in 1916. That’s fine; it’s the themes that count.
The chief theme, of course, is art itself, which wafts into pretension all too easily. Depp says that he was most passionately interested in the drive to be creative, that urge he admires in his idols and inspirations: Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Shane MacGowan. The film itself is dedicated to rock-and-roll hellraiser Jeff Beck. Pretension thus comes seasoned with indulgence and excess: the legends in Johnny Depp’s pantheon are mostly Kerouac’s oft-quoted “mad ones, who burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”. His version of Modigliani is mad in that way, for sure. There is an attraction to that but, like most drunks, he does try our patience.
Title: Modi – Three Days on the Wing Of Madness
Festival: San Sebastian (Out of Competition)
International sales: Veterans/Goodfellas
Director: Johnny Depp
Screenwriters: Jerzy Kromolowski, Mary Kromolowski
Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Stephen Graham, Al Pacino, Antonia Desplat, Bruno Gouery, Luisa Ranieri
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins
