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:24
Fresh:1
Rotten:23
Average Rating:3.5/10
Consensus: Nearly everyone is miscast in this disjointed and slow-moving portrait of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
Theatrical Release:May 13, 2005 Limited
Synopsis: The story takes place in Paris in the years after the First World War. Modigliani, a Jew, has fallen in love with Jeanne (Elsa Zylberstein), a young and beautiful Catholic girl. The couple have an... The story takes place in Paris in the years after the First World War. Modigliani, a Jew, has fallen in love with Jeanne (Elsa Zylberstein), a young and beautiful Catholic girl. The couple have an illegitimate child, and Jeanne's bigoted parents send the baby to a faraway convent to be raised by nuns. Modigliani is distraught and needs money to rescue and raise his child. The answer arrives in the shape of Paris' annual art competition. Prize money and a guaranteed career await the winner. Neither Modigliani, nor his dearest friend and rival Picasso (Omid Djalili) have ever entered the competition, believing that it is beneath true artists like themselves. But push comes to shove with the welfare of his child on the line, and Modigliani signs up for the competition in a drunken and drug-induced tirade. Picasso follows suit and all of Paris is aflutter with excitement at who will win. With the balance of his relationship with Jeanne on the line, Modigliani tackles this work with the hopes of creating a masterpiece, and knows that all the artists of Paris are doing the same. Emotionally-charged and bathed in absinthe green, MODIGLIANI is the decadent portrayal of this tortured genius, his debilitating addictions, and overwhelming passion. The film delivers nothing short of a deeply heartfelt tribute to the artist. -- © Official Site [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
Just another artistic sacrifice to life’s ironies, cruelties, and bad filmmakers.
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.
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August 18, 2005:
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