Life
Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness – Johnny Depp’s film about Modigliani is all about him ★★
As director of this film about the Jewish Italian painter’s life, Depp fails to get to the soul of the artist
July 25, 2025 10:58
As director of this film about the Jewish Italian painter’s life, Depp fails to get to the soul of the artist
July 25, 2025 10:58“Artist, Italian, Jew.” is how Amedeo Modigliani describes himself in Johnny Depp’s film about the artist.
Depp directs (as opposed to stars) and the film suffers gravely as a result. The narrative dives into 72 chaotic hours of Modigliani’s life while he was living in Paris during the First World War. Depp’s approach – or mistake – is that he wants his directorial decisions to be visibly obvious, and therefore obviously his.
The title role is played by Riccardo Scamarcio who any real-life red-blooded male would be glad to be depicted by. He brings lashings of charisma, a fair amount of angst and a light comedic touch to the role of an artist who was recognised by his peers and lovers as a genius but who was cruelly underrated by the art establishment. The latter is personified here by none other than Al Pacino whose presence in the film has more than a little to do with producer Barry Navidi, whose screen version of The Merchant of Venice (2004) starred an excellent Pacino as Shylock.
Here, in a film populated by real-life characters including an underused Stephen Graham as Modi’s agent Léopold Zborowski, Pacino plays the art collector Maurice Gangnat who can make or break an artist by deciding to buy his or her work – or not. He features in the film’s only scene with tension in which Modigliani is skinned of confidence after gatecrashing the collector’s dinner in a posh restaurant. Rejected, Modigliani spirals into self-destruction.
Up until this point the meandering narrative is brimful of directorial flourishes that fall as flat as a bare canvas. The tone is set early on in another posh restaurant where the dishevelled yet dashing artist offends an army officer. The resulting chase sees Modi mount a sweet trolley and make his escape by surfing through a stained glass window. If the swashbuckling stunt was inspired by Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the cuts to Keystone Cops-style jerky black-and-white sequences in which Modi is chased by the gendarmerie with their baguette-sized truncheons is, well, just wrong. It smacks of a dilettante who announces an idea out loud with the phrase, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if…”. But it wouldn’t and isn’t.
Depp is interested in milieu, but the febrile and fertile moment of the post-impressionist Paris moment is laced with prosaic dialogue by Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski that verges on the tedious. The film flares into life with Modi’s peers, who include fellow artists Maurice Utrillo and most interestingly the unhinged Jewish artist Chaïm Soutine (Ryan McParland), and his morbid fascination with meat, a subject which he paints in his fly-infested pied-à-terre as it rots in front of him.
The “wing of madness” of the film’s title is not the kind of psychological torment seen in many a Van Gogh film. Rather the phrase, we learn during an ostentatiously literary exchange between Modigliani and his lover, the writer Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat), is from Baudelaire.
No, madness here means hell-raising, a quality Depp clearly admires. Yet it gets us no nearer to the soul of this Jewish artist, not even when he is haunted by visions of war dead accompanied by what sounds like the Kaddish prayer.
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