MOVIE REVIEW 'MODIGLIANI'
Piling on the Paint With a Trowel in Paris, or Romania
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: July 1, 2005
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. Here is a checklist of some don'ts, offered in no particular order.
Don't cast a wide-eyed little boy as the dissipated grown-up artist's sorrowful inner child showing up to mope cutely whenever Modi, as the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani is nicknamed, lands in hot water. Don't surround your famous subject with famous friends who look and act like mannequins unless you have some notion of how to give them real personalities instead of cartoonlike traits.
Picasso (Omid Djalili) as a stout glowering oaf chewing on a pipe will not do. Nor will Gertrude Stein (Miriam Margolyes) as a bossy, bug-eyed Jewish-mother caricature. It's not a good idea to have these people and their friends show up like a robotic cheering section to shout and sing in unison at birthday parties and other festive events. Better to bring in the chorus from "La Boheme"; at least it can really sing.
And don't forget what era you are in. When the painter and his sweetheart do a back-bending kiss in silhouette on the rain-swept streets of Paris (actually Romania, where most of the movie was filmed), it's not appropriate to play Edith Piaf's "Vie en Rose" over the soundtrack; that recording is still three decades in the future from the late teens, when this scene takes place.
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