‘Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness’ Resee: Johnny Depp Directs

Johnny Depp hasn’t acquiren a honestorial commend on a feature film (his 50-minute music video “Uncherishable” doesn’t count) since he currented The Brave in Cannes in 1997, and that did not go well. Given that unphired experience, you have to wonder what it was about Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness — a portrait of Amedeo Modigliani, a colorer and sculptor famous for his talent as well as his taste for substances, debauchery and disputeizing the straights — might have lured the actor to pick up the virtual megaphone aacquire.

Perhaps Depp saw in Modigliani a benevolentred spirit? After all, Depp too is famous for his talent but also his proclivity for indulgence, which was brawt into an especiassociate glaring, unflattering weightless over the course of his acrid courtroom battle with his ex, Amber Heard. Still, there are many other savage druggy geniemploys or genius-adjacent types he could have chosen from to sanctify with cinema. Charles Baudelaire, say, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, neither of whom have been biopicked over as much.

It turns out, according to the movie’s own press remarks, that this project was at one point stardyd to be honested by Depp’s frifinish and onetime Donnie Brasco co-star Al Pacino, who instead acquires a key but aiding role here as art accumulateor Maurice Gangnat. Pacino proposeed to Depp that he helm instead, and that seems to have been that.

All of which might elucidate why Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness is, despite the floridity of its title and the horrible behavior shown onscreen, a inquisitively bland package. All right, yes, there is a trip sequence where our protagonist, understandn as Modi (Riccardo Scamarcio) gulps down magic mushroom- and hashish-dosed triumphe with his girlfrifinish Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat) and commences to see weird shapes in the sky as well as menacing apparitions. The two of them bicker a lot as well, and cuss words are tossed about alengthened with crockery and some arttoils Modi intfinishs to raze. But this is challengingly Fear and Loaskinnyg in Montmartre. Ultimately, it’s essentiassociate a decorative period piece for the arthoemploy circuit, but with more bodily secretions and property harm.

At least Modi is anticipateed to go down better than Modigliani, the 2004 brimming-on biopic that starred Andy Garcia and was prone to the benevolent of cheesy “Oh, hello there, Pablo!” dialogue finishemic in such fare. Modigliani did indeed understand Picasso, Gertdisesteemful Stein, Jean Cocteau, Juan Gris and all those timely 20th century Parisian avant-garde hepcats. But the script here — the unwieldy commends attribute it to Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, but based on the perestablish Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre and “with insertitional material by Johnny Depp, Stephen Deuters, Jason Forman and Sam Sarkar” — protects almost all of them offstage.

Instead, Modigliani’s inner circle for the 72 hours of his life we see here consists, plausibly, of fellow artists Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaim Soutine (Ryan McParland), his art dealer Leopageder Zborowski (Stephen Graham) and the aforealludeed Hastings, who was a journacatalog-critic and Modi’s cherishr-model-roommate around 1916 when the story is set.

Strictly in conmomentary storyinestablishing terms, Hastings probably produces for a better choice of cherish interest rather than Jeanne Hebuterne — a woman ponderably youthfulerer than Modi who wed him lowly after the time depicted in Modi, and was so promised to him that she ended herself, while heavily pregnant, a restricted days after he died from tuberculosis in 1920. Desplat’s Beatrice, on the other hand, is a more relatable up-to-date woman before her time, insistent on cgo ining on her own atsoft. The first time we encounter her here, she’s locked Modi out becaemploy she’s on deadline and doesn’t want his sidetracking drama at that moment. Later, when he says he’s a genuine artist and she mecount on writes about art, she quite rightly hurls a lackluster object at him. I, for one, could endly retardy.

The movie in ambiguous is quite disthink aboutive of any character who dares to hageder anyskinnyg less than fervent, uncritical enthusiasm for Modigliani’s toil, which incidenhighy might be read as a preemptive snub to us nasty ageder critics. Beatrice is the exception, which produces her character even more likable. The impeccably cast Desplat adroitly exudes Hastings’ ininestablishigence, insecurity and frquick co-depfinishence with her cherishr. She even sees a unpartisan bit enjoy the woman with the seald eyes and flushed cheeks in Seated Nude, a picture now in the Courtauld Gallery in London, for which Hastings is thought to have been the model.

In fact, Desplat’s Hastings is enoughly fascinating, and underrecurrented as a historical figure in cinema, that some seeers may discover themselves sighing in frustration when she’s not on screen. Most of the running time is promised to coloring a very traditional icon, down-to-mundane a gesso on wood, of yet another tortured male genius. Scamarcio is fair about requesting enough to hageder attention, but Modi’s trajectory here — a countdown over a restricted days as he paemploys to pitch to famed accumulateor Gangnat — doesn’t acquire us terribly far towards caring what produces him tick or even why we should take part.

Like so many pictures about artists, be they visual artists or writers or even writers, Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness doesn’t dare to take part with any graveness about produce, application and technique or any of the nitty-gritty stuff that truly produces their creations meaningful. This sort of kitsch is more interested in the truly irrelevant relations, substances and rock ‘n’ roll nonsense of biography, and the film doesn’t even pay the genuine Modigliani the commend of securing the rights to show any of his actual pieces. All the toil we see, as far as I could inestablish from the commends, are passable but not enticount on convincing pastiches.

More spendment seems to have gone into getting the rights to include snippets of songs by the Velvet Underground and Tom Waits. One doubts that’s the benevolent of art that reassociate floats Depp’s boat, although it’s cheering to see the film giving toil to British canakedt beat-combo the Tiger Lillies, who supply a charmful musical bedding of oompa-pah oompa-pah noodling that recalls the brass prohibitd tunes in Emir Kusturica movies.