Instead of trying to provide insight into this genius's debilitating madness, Davis prefers to wallow in incoherent and clichéd misery, punctuated by poetically oblique imagery.
Modigliani (2005)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 23
Fresh: 1
Rotten:22
Average Rating: 3.7/10
Consensus: Nearly everyone is miscast in this disjointed and slow-moving portrait of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
Theatrical Release:May 13, 2005 Limited
Synopsis: This lavish biopic directed by Mick Davis follows Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani (Andy Garcia) as he struggles to establish himself as a successful artist in early 20th-century Paris. The film... This lavish biopic directed by Mick Davis follows Italian painter Amadeo Modigliani (Andy Garcia) as he struggles to establish himself as a successful artist in early 20th-century Paris. The film mainly focuses on Modigliani's tumultuous relationships with friend and rival Pablo Picasso (Omid Djalili), and with Jeanne Hebuterne (Elsa Zylberstein), a beautiful young woman the artist seduces and begins painting a year prior to when the film begins. Now a mother to Modigliani's illegitimate child, Jeanne is torn between her love for the painter (whom her father forbids her to see because he's a Jew), and her loyalty towards her baby (which her father threatens to hand over to the authorities if Jeanne has any involvement with Modigliani). All too ready to accept his fate as a failure, Modigliani has not sold a painting in months, lives in relative squalor, and spends his hours drinking heavily and smoking opium despite warnings that it is killing him. The film travels with the artist through the eventful year leading up to his death, setting the stage for a night that brings both triumph and tragedy. Through the reappearing character of a boyhood version of the artist, MODIGLIANI explores what drew the man to painting, and the demons that ultimately drove him to self-destruction. While MODIGLIANI presents itself as a work of fiction, it does provide the viewer with a visually stimulating outlet into a time and place where much of modern art history was made. [More]
Starring: Andy Garcia, Omid Djalili, Elsa Zylberstein, Udo Kier
Starring: Andy Garcia, Omid Djalili, Elsa Zylberstein, Udo Kier, Hyppolite Girarot, Eva Herzigova, Miriam Margolyes
Director: Mick Davis
Director: Mick Davis
Screenwriter: Mick Davis
Producer: Philippe Martinez, Andre Djaoui, Stephanie Martinez-Campeau, Alan Latham
Studio: Innovation Film Group
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Reviews for Modigliani
A film of vitality, with imagery as haunting and romantic as it is intense.
No one expected a documentary, but serious art-history students may feel let down.
The real-life Modigliani did indeed live a short, tragic life, but this factually inaccurate, plodding film makes it feel twice as long.
Modigliani is slow, shamefully cliched and disjointed as a cubist portrait.
Thanks to writer-director Mick Davis, the film, like its subject, dies young.
It's hard to take this oddball movie seriously, right down to the undisguised streetwise-American accent of Andy Garcia as the Italian Jew Amedeo Modigliani.
The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.
It ain't pretty but you have a choisa: See Modigliani or rent Derek Jarman's Caravaggio instead.
Sadly, instead of situating the l'amour fou in the artistic ferment of the period (1917-1920), Davis twists the period to fit the story.
Director Mick Davis shows little if any imagination in presenting the troubled genius or the remarkable Montparnasse art scene of the World War I era, and that's the real bummer.
Modigliani may have been noted for his drunken volatility and arrogance, but once you get a dozen years or so of Behind the Musics and E! True Hollywood Stories behind you, it's hard to get worked up about that sort of thing anymore.
Mick Davis' prosaic art biopic Modigliani is a tiresome, hammy and ultimately annoying portrait of the artist as a young drunk.
Modigliani’s problems lie in its contentment with superficial clichés
A third of it is an episodically disordered string of scenes that coalesce into a narrative. The remaining two thirds is melodrama.
Despite some nice shots of scenes converting into well-known art, Modigliani is plainly, badly directed.
A fantastic reminder that the only thing worse than a bad movie is a bad, pretentious movie.
The material is just too familiar and we are given know reason to care if Modigliani lives or dies.
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