MOVIE REVIEW

Andy Garcia plays the Italian painter in Mick Davis' film.

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

A great Modernist gets conventionally romanticized in Mick Davis' 'Modigliani.' In "Modigliani," Andy Garcia plays the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, major figure in European Modernism, tubercular party animal and fixture of the Montparnasse cafe circuit in the early part of the 20th century. Scottish director Mick Davis has likened 1919 Paris to "the rock and roll of that time." And if a portrait of the artist as a proto-David Lee Roth appeals, then "Modigliani" is for you.

Davis isn't the first to be seduced by the connection between artistic genius and hedonistic excess. (Modigliani, "Modi" to friends, enjoyed smoking hash, drinking naked and brawling.) Nor is he the first to be attracted to the notion of a community of 24-hour bohemian party people. But I'm pretty sure he's the first to depict Pablo Picasso as a precursor to Jon Lovitz, and Utrillo, Soutine and Rivera as the Three Stooges.

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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. As Garcia plays him, Modi is the kind of monster-of-rock who swaggers into a cafe and immediately elicits sighs, murmurs and spontaneous applause. He doesn't trash hotel rooms, but close. In an early scene, he's introduced to a wealthy New York art dealer described by a lover as having "a lot of money, but no taste." When the dealer expresses an interest in his work, the artist flings the money in his face and stalks out of the room. (The gesture is especially baffling, not only because it would suggest a degree of low self-esteem not otherwise evident in Garcia's portrayal, but because the chronically ill, not-yet-famous Modigliani was as hard up as they came.)

The story loosely spans the last three years of the artist's life, from his first meeting with the young art student Jeanne Hebuterne (played by Elsa Zylberstein, a swan-necked French actress who bears a striking resemblance to a Modigliani portrait) in 1917 to their deaths in 1920. It was a hectic period, which Davis loosely scrambles and compresses for the sake of expediency. The couple produced a daughter, Modi's health steadily declined, his first solo show was shut down by the police, he expired and Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second, flung herself from a window the following day.

Apparently surmising this was not quite drama enough for a movie, Davis has devoted a large portion of the film to a mostly invented rivalry between Modi and Picasso, who go mano a mano for the top cash prize in the "Salon des Artistes." (This may be a reference to Modigliani's inclusion in the Salon d'Automne in the final months of his life, one of several important group exhibitions throughout Europe that included Modigliani's work in his lifetime.) In between bouts of drinking and getting up in the grill of Jeanne's father — here a symbol for all the anti-Semitism in Paris — Modi prepares for his big face-off with the famous Spaniard, played by Omid Djalili as a petulant buffoon in a bad rug. (For her portrayal of Picasso's Russian wife, Olga, supermodel Eva Herzigova borrows heavily from Natasha of "Rocky & Bullwinkle," and Romania stands in for Paris, unconvincingly.)

Davis takes pains to infuse the solitary and introspective act of painting with as much testosterone as possible, a move that culminates in an unfortunate painting-as-sex montage set to a techno-chorale in which Rivera, Utrillo, Soutine and Modigliani climax simultaneously.

Deeply silly and tendentious, "Modigliani" is a sincere attempt to construct a myth from shopworn notions about artistic genius that isn't made any fresher by lines like the one the unwed teen mother Jeanne lays on a priest. "Forgive me father, I fell in love, is that a sin?"

To which the priest, who must have just wandered in from the church of Hallmark down the street, replies, "No, my dear, the sin would be not to have loved at all."

Scenes like these are a disservice to the memory of a painter as talented and interesting as Modigliani, who unlike Picasso doesn't have dozens of alternate portrayals to counter the image of himself suddenly channeling De Niro and leaning into his father-in-law's ear to snarl, "Grandpapa, I'll be watching you." But what's done is done. As Jeanne's mother says, "You can't change destiny." I'm not sure what that means, but it sure sounds like art.

'Modigliani'

MPAA rating: R for some language and drug use

Times guidelines: The usual famous-artist debauchery, conventionally romanticized

Distributed by Bauer Martinez Studios. Director Mick Davis. Producer Philippe Martinez, Stephanie Martinez, Andre Djaoui, Alan Latham. Screenplay by Mick Davis. Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.