Celebrated in time for his distinctively lanky, almond-eyed interpretations of the human form, the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani died in 1920 at the age of just 35, tubercular and destitute and celebrated for very little indeed. At 61, Johnny Depp has both handily outlived Modigliani and outranked him in terms of antemortem celebrity. Yet there’s more than a twinge of empathy for that most irresistible of archetypes — the great, iconoclastic artist under-appreciated in his own time — running through “Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness,” an ostensibly free-spirited Modigliani biopic that marks the embattled star’s first directorial outing in nearly 30 years. Broad in tone and narrow in scope, the film is in thrall to the idea of creating art outside mainstream financial and aesthetic models, though its structure and outlook are not unfamiliar.
Often jovial despite its tragic true-life trappings, and considerably more accessible than its unwieldy full title suggests, “Modi” is likely to draw distributor interest in Europe, where Depp’s career has taken less of a hit in recent years than it has across the pond. (The film had its premiere in the main competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival.) Elsewhere, it’s a marginal proposition — though still sure to be more widely seen than “The Brave,” Depp’s first feature as a director, which was swiftly memory-holed after its 1997 Cannes debut. “Modi” is certainly more accomplished than that ill-starred vanity project, and perhaps benefits from Depp’s restraint in remaining behind the camera this time, with Italian star Riccardo Scamarcio’s charismatic turn in the title role the film’s liveliest asset.
Adapted from a 1979 play by the late Dennis McIntyre, the long-gestating “Modi” was once mooted as an acting-directing vehicle for Al Pacino — whose involvement is now limited to a ripe single-scene cameo as famed art collector Maurice Gangnat, presented here as one of the many art-world elders who couldn’t identify the extent of Modigliani’s genius. Gangnat was in fact more of a patron to the artist than the film lets on, but the script by husband-and-wife duo Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski makes no claims for historical authenticity, instead evoking its subject’s spirit and sensibility across an imagined three-day period of his life in First World War Paris.
Modigliani’s death, then, is still a couple of years away, but a constant, hacking cough spells out his doom in the manner of classic melodrama. We encounter the artist turning out quick-sketch portraits for bourgeois diners at a high-end café, though his rebellious instincts soon gets the better of him, as a verbal altercation with one customer swiftly escalates into a window-smashing barney, cuing a police chase complete with monochrome transitions into accelerated silent-movie slapstick. When he’s refused sanctuary by Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat), the famed British writer and his on-off lover, he goes bar-crawling instead with fellow scoundrel artists Chaim Soutine (Ryan McParland) and Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery, more or less replicating his nutty bohemian act from TV’s “Emily in Paris” in period garb).
What ensues is a hangout movie to some extent, following the trio’s Rabelaisian antics as they mutually seek purpose, inspiration and budget booze on the seamier side of the City of Lights — while Modigliani sporadically drops in on his bumbling art-dealer friend Leopold Zborowski (Stephen Graham) to see if interest in his work has picked up at all. Much of this is pitched as earthy comedy, lurching into a doomier dramatic register as the horrors of the ongoing war are occasionally foregrounded, and our hero is plagued by nightmarish visions of his imminent demise.
His turbulent relationship with Hastings, meanwhile, is essayed via various alternately heated and teasing conversations about his potential legacy, the destruction in creation or vice versa, and the tension between their roles as artist and journalist. When he complains that “I make art, you only write about it,” she bristles, while it’s not hard to sense a message in here from the filmmaker to his critics. Even at his most erratic and irrational, Modigliani has the film’s sympathies at every turn, not to mention its fascinated adulation: Its few scenes of him at work are shot with a hushed, glowing reverence. Scamarcio’s performance, with its caddish lightness of delivery, keeps things from cloying, as does some snappy chemistry with Desplat.
Dramatically, however, “Modi” begins to run in place by the halfway mark, as the narrative gears itself toward the prospect of a potentially career-making audience with Gangnat — though most viewers will know there’s no climactic triumph in store. Handsomely shot (by Dariusz Wolski and Nicola Pecorini) and designed (by David Warren) in a suitably Modigliani-esque palette of ochres and tans, Depp’s film is palpably sincere in its admiration for its subject and perhaps more self-reflexively piqued on behalf of all artists working in a system where art isn’t everything. “Your power is in your pocket,” Modigliani spits at Gangnat. “Your taste is in your ass.” Like many a famous-painter biopic, however, “Modi” itself is more dutiful, more conventional, than sparked by genius.