Director Report Card: Mary Harron (2023)

7. Dalíland

Some films, or rather some filmmakers, are just unlucky. On paper, a biographical film about Salvador Dalí sounds like a sure shot. Dalí is one of the most famous artists of all time, an iconic figure not just in the art world but in all of popular culture, all over the world. The man and his work is beloved and controversial, sparking debate. The perfect subject for a film to cover. Pair up that role with the right actor and you're liable to get some sort of awards attention. This was the set-up of Mary Harron's latest film, “Dalíland.” Ben Kingsley would star as the world renown, mustachioed painter. And, alright, Kinglsey has done a lot of shitty, forgettable movies but he's still widely regarded as a great actor. His presence in a movie isn't nothing. And yet “Dalíland” would be barely released this year with little to no fanfare, ignored by both cinema goers and critics. The question of why this played out the way it did is now one I will attempt to answer.

In 1973, James Linton, a worker at a New York art gallery, is told that living legend Salvador Dalí is looking for a new assistant. Obviously a fan of Dalí, Linton leaps at the chance. James soon finds himself immersed in the unique world of Dalí, where wild parties full of eccentrics – literally models and rock stars – are a nightly occurrence. Linton also butts heads with Gala, Dalí's equally notorious wife, who is currently carrying on a love affair with rock singer Jeff Fenholt. As Linton attempts to navigate this world, and encourage Dalí to finish some paintings, he falls in bed with a young lady himself while also discovering far more about his idol and his personal life than he ever knew.

The first answer that comes to mind, when I pose the question of why “Dalíland” was completely buried earlier this year, is simply... Because it's not very good. Probably the biggest problem facing the film is one that occasionally crops up in biopics. Instead of just making the movie about the famous subject matter, some pedestrian audience surrogate is inserted into the story. This presents several problems. First off, Salvador Dalí is destined to be the most interesting person in the room no matter who he's standing next to. (Assuming Luis Buñuel wasn't in the room that day.) Asking the audience to relate to some other fucking guy, when an immediately fascinating figure like that is around, is a pretty big ask. 

Worst yet, James Linton isn't even a real person. Upon watching “Dalíland,” I assumed the movie must be based on a book written by some young man who actually held this position in Dalí's life. Considering how the movie ends, that struck me as extremely likely. A minute of research proves this to not entirely be the case. Linton is a composite character from a number of real life people who rotated in and out of this position back in the day. Unsurprisingly, Dalí and Gala burned through assistants quickly. This shows that Harron and screenwriter John C. Walsh decided to make a movie about Dalí – Harron has said that this is a project she's spent year developing – and consciously made the choice to have the film not actually be about Salvador Dalí, without even adapting one specific book written from someone else's perspective. 

From a marketing level, I can see how this decision could possibly make sense. “Oh, the average theater goer isn't going to be interested in some old, dead artist, much less one as deliberately weird and abrasive as Dalí was. We have to make this movie about some 20-something twink if we expect the zoomers to see this.” Not that this movie played in more than a handful of theaters... This also goes against the obvious logic at work here, that the people most inclined to see a movie about Dalí are people already interested in Dalí. All of that aside, if the script or star had invested even the tiniest amount of effort into making the protagonist compelling, all of that could've, possibly, been forgiven. Unfortunately, as audience surrogates almost always are, James Linton is a completely bland slab of stale cheese. The role is played by Christopher Briney who is – and I could tell this just from looking at him – best known for starring in a mildly popular streaming series based on some Y.A. romance books. Briney has that blank, pretty quality that makes him irresistible to casting directors and completely uninviting to audiences. His performance here is comparable to a cardboard marionette, unenthusiastically puppetted around the screen. 

All of this, I suppose, is me complaining about the movie I wanted “Dalíland” to be, instead of considering it as the movie it actually is. Alright, let me attempt to meet this film on its own level. Obviously, the premise behind “Dalíland” is that Linton is swept up in this crazy world, centered around an aging but incredibly eccentric icon and all the colorful hanger-ons that hang-on to him. In the process, he will learn a lot about his idol and a little about himself. “Dalíland” at least gets the first half of that set-up briefly right. The early scenes of the wild parties Dalí throws are kind of compelling. We see people do drugs, snorting cocaine off gold platters, as they dance the night away in wild costumes. Linton is invited into a threesome, which Salvador watches and masturbates too. We weren't going to get out of this story with a peek into the mad artist's sex life, naturally... A montage is devoted to Linton assembling some nude models for Dalí, who then dip their asses in paint and press them against a canvas. Dalí hangs out with Alice Cooper and other luminaries of the time, all witnessed through the protagonist's eyes.

However, we never really get a grip on what effect this has on Linton. The biggest reason for that is because the character is so completely undeveloped. He falls in love, or at least lust, with a model and they share a brief affair, a plot point that comes and goes with little meaning or impact on the story. After a few weeks with his new boss, Linton says that he feels like he belongs in Dalí's world, that he's finally found the place for him. If that's the case, we never get much of a sense of it through the film. James is such a passive observer to everything that happens, so totally void of personality of his own, that any growth or change he undergoes is completely unnoticed by the audience. At the end of the film, he seems to be the exact same person he was at the beginning. The film stubbornly refuses to make this guy interesting in any way whatsoever, once again making you wonder why the fuck the movie is about him. Instead of the person whose name is in the goddamn title!

Moreover, there's little indication that Linton's time with Dalí had any impact on the artist's life as well. Dalí calls Linton St. Sebastian, his nickname for all the pretty boys that passed through his home, proving that he considered them interchangable. He shows him around some sentimental spots and regales him with stories of his youth. Which, one imagines a well-known egomaniac (though one that probably earned the right to be a bit egotistical) like Dalí probably did with everyone. The concluding moment of the movie, I assumed, was an act of ego-stroking on the real Linton's behalf, an imagined scenario where the man assumed his time with Dalí meant a lot more to him than it actually did. But, like I said, Linton is a stand-in for a number of dudes, so one assumes that sequence is the work of Harron and her husband too. 

Another big reason, I think, “Dalíland” got buried at the box office is who it stars. Or rather, who it was meant to star. See, it was announced, early on, that the film was going to star Ezra Miller. The part of Linton was, I was unsurprised to discover, written with Miller in mind. However, scheduling conflicts forced Miller to take a much smaller role in the film. Instead, they play the younger version of Dalí, which ends up occupying all of two or three scenes in the entire movie. “Scheduling conflicts,” anyway, is what Harron blames Miller's lessened role in the film on. I have no idea how much of Miller's problematic behavior was well known in 2021, when “Dalíland” was filming, but you can only assume that everyone was aware of the incoming storm regarding that issue. (One also assumes that “Dalíland” was dumped into a few theaters this past summer in some faint hope that it could ride the coattails of the big tent pole superhero movie Miller starred in, which flopped in theaters exactly a week after this did.) 

Miller, in their few scenes, seems to do what they usually do. That would be mug furiously, displaying a twitching body language and sporting a wispy as hell mustache, as an unconvincing facsimile of a young Dalí. These flashback scenes make up only a small portion of the film, which again raises a serious question. The life of Dalí, especially his young friendship with Bunuel and rise through the art scene, is obviously a really dramatic story that would be a great basis for a movie... Which, of course, it has been. But “Dalíland” is partially focused on Dalí's relationship with his wife and muse Gala, which gave the film an angle to explore that “Little Ashes” didn't cover. The peeks we get at the stormy relationship between Dalí and Gala are definitely the highlight of “Dalíland.” Once again, there's the unavoidable question of why did the filmmakers choose to focus on this bland surrogate character when there's such a fascinating, dramatically juicy narrative already right here to explore.

With the way it constantly botches attempts to make a story-worth-telling actually interesting, “Dalíland” eventually falls apart totally in its last act. With all other avenues of making its audience surrogate compelling exhausted, the script focuses on the idea that some of the people around Dalí were ripping him off. Selling fakes of his work for inflated prices and so on. A figure like Salvador Dalí, and Gala Dalí, clearly have some big ideas floating around them. Was she just another one of the hanger-ons of Dalí's infamous reputation? The way she's sleeping with a long-haired rocker dude, and helping him launch his own doomed career, certainly suggests that. At the same time, at this point in his career, Dalí was kind of a burn-out too, spending more time partying and canoodling with celebs than actually creating mind-bending works of art. 

The question has always floated around a theatrical, self-promoting figure like Dalí, whether he actually earned his reputation, if it was all hype. Was he a true pioneer or just remarkably good at selling himself? A genius or a hack? Not to mention the way Dalí's capricious – and probably contrarian, I've always felt – politics effected his standing in the art world. Naturally, that topic is only touched upon here in the most superficial of ways, via one line from Dalí about the king of Spain. All of this proves to just be yet another dropped thread, an interesting premise the movie bats around and never really addresses on the way to a hugely anticlimatic ending.

Ultimately, the only thing “Dalíland” really has going for it is a pretty decent Ben Kingsley performance. Kingsley is one of those actors that always gives it his all, no matter if the film around him doesn't live up to his talent. (Which they often do not.) Clearly a figure as divisive and outrageous as Dalí provides Kingsley with a chance to ham it up nicely. He does so and even manages to give the artist a bit of pathos, during his rare moments of self-reflection. Otherwise, “Dalíland” is wasted potential from beginning to end. A great idea for a movie that fumbles the ball by taking the most boring angle possible to explore its topic from. Maybe Mary Harron's next movie will be good... [Grade: C-]