The writer Gustave Flaubert once counseled fellow creatives, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” A brief survey of the history of the arts suggests that this advice is not heeded regularly.
In the opening minutes of “Modi,” the title character, the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, is depicted standing atop a table at an exclusive Paris restaurant, insulting a general and his wife, before falling through a stained-glass window out into the street. The picture shifts to black and white, and in silent-film-style the artist flees the cops, darting around the columns on the sidewalk of the Rue de Rivoli. Even if you know nothing of the actual life of Modigliani, whose distinctive portraits of (mostly) long-necked women with haunted eyes enhance art museums the world over, you can sense he’s not long for this world.
As its title states, this movie, directed by Johnny Depp and adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre, takes in three days of the artist’s life, but they’re crucial ones, as he goes into frenzied easel activity, hoping to finish and sell some paintings to satisfy his debts while he’s on the run. The movie makes cartoons out of his comrades Chaim Soutine and Maurice Utrillo, perhaps the better to render Modigliani that much more manly.
The energetic and arguably strenuous performance by the lead actor, Riccardo Scamarcio, is something of a flex, to be sure. And just in case he’s not putting across enough of a tortured artist effect, Depp shows his character having a nervous breakdown in the street accompanied first by the Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and then Tom Waits’s “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”
Modi
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.
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