Large portions of the online population are, no doubt, greatly invested in Johnny Depp’s study of Amedeo Modigliani turning out to be a rampaging dud. Just as many – the section that tweeted swooning support during that court case – will have already decided it’s the greatest masterpiece this side of Battleship Potemkin.
I have disappointing news for both factions: the film will just about do. Three Days on the Wing of Madness (the title alone had me fanning a sweaty brow before the titles rolled) certainly has its moment of adolescent indulgence. Yes, there is a scene in which the artist takes loads of drugs – booze laced with hash and mushrooms – in a graveyard while fireworks clatter overhead. But brief research confirms that Modì, as he was to pals, did indeed indulge in what the Garda calls cannabis resin.
True, Depp does manage to insinuate The Black Angel’s Death Song, by The Velvet Underground, on to the soundtrack. But everyone does that sort of thing these days. It’s 20 years since Sofia Coppola had Marie Antoinette promenade to New Order.
So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either. Adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre – one that the movie’s costar Al Pacino has been seeking to film for 50 years – the feature goes among Modigliani and his pals in an idealised Paris at the height of the first World War.
READ MORE
Riccardo Scamarcio, a big star in Italy, is well cast as a charmer whose self-belief is as much a professional handicap as it is an artistic accelerant. When Pacino’s grand art dealer scorns Modì’s paintings but offers a small fortune for a sculptured head, the dissolute genius turns him down flat. Not for sale.
Ryan McParland is gaunt as Modì’s friend and rival Chaïm Soutine. (The two painted well-known portraits of each other.) Stephen Graham has gruff fun with the influential dealer Léopold Zborowski. Antonia Desplat just about makes Beatrice Hastings, the English-born writer, poet and lover to Modì, come alive, despite underwritten dialogue.
The more it goes on the clearer it becomes that, though Depp no doubt admires Modigliani’s work, his real passion here is for the eternally intoxicating fantasy of Parisian bohemia. Scamarcio could be any of the thousand geniuses whose absinthe consumption condemned them to early death in the tenements of Montmartre.
But that myth remains attractive for a reason. The romance still has purchase even in an entertainment as slight as this.
In cinemas from Friday, July 11th
