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Film Features Film/TV

Dalíland

Dalíland begins with Salvador Dalí’s appearance on What’s My Line?, the classic game show where blindfolded contestants try to guess the identity of the mystery guest. “Are you a performer? Do you have something to do with the arts?” The contestants are baffled because Dalí answers “yes” to everything. What finally gives him away is a question about his famous waxed mustache.

Dalí wasn’t lying. He was an artist, one of the greatest of the 20th century — and he was also a performer. The character he played for most of his life was Salvador Dalí, the crazy artist who is also a super-genius. “Geniuses are not allowed to die,” he said near the end of his life. “The progress of the human race depends on us!”

Where the act ends and the man begins? Nobody really knows. Dalí really was a super-genius artist, the most famous of the Surrealists who terrorized the buttoned-up art world of the 1920s and 1930s. He was also his own best hype man. Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí with more perfection than affection. Kingsley first came to prominence playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic, so he’s got experience with historical personages. Watching Kingsley apply his world-class chops to mimicking one of history’s great lunatics is, as you might expect, the fun part of Dalíland. The Surrealists learned the art of the high-profile stunt from the Dadaists. Dalí perfected it. At one point in Dalíland, he asks his assistant James Linton (Christopher Briney) to bring him live ants and a full suit of armor that must be Spanish in origin. “Is it for a painting?” James asks.

“No, it’s for a party.”

Dalí’s wife and muse was Gala (Barbara Sukowa), the quintessential muse and “art wife,” the reasonably sane member of the relationship who keeps the books and interfaces with the “real” world. To say they had a strange relationship is a massive understatement. Gala appeared in several of Dalí’s most famous paintings, often in the guise of the Virgin Mary. According to Dalí hanger-on Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse), they rarely, if ever, had sex — at least with each other. Gala had a fiery temper, and after one particularly intense tirade, Dalí turns to James and declares, “Isn’t she magnificent?”

There’s a lot for a filmmaker like American Psycho’s Mary Harron to work with — the story of some of the greatest visual masterpieces of the last century, the legendary eccentric who created them, and the weirdly functional, dysfunctional relationship that sustained him. Which is why it’s so puzzling that Dalíland feels like such a damp squib.

The problem (one of them, anyway) is the point of view. Dalíland is not Dalí’s story, but James’, who we meet as a gallery owner in 1985, when Dalí was denying he was dying. Then James flashes back to the early 1970s, when he was Dalí’s assistant for a few very eventful months. He first meets the Dalís in New York, where the painter is holed up in a luxury hotel, creating a new batch of paintings for an upcoming opening. The Dalís live in a constant state of cocktail party, with artists, models, and assorted rich people hungry for clout, drinking champagne and snorting coke on Dalí’s dime. The film works best when Harron gives in to the chaos: Watching Ben Kingsley trying to disco dance as 70-year-old Dalí is a particular highlight.

The Dalís only operated on a cash basis, and James becomes their bagman — which means he sees both the people who are stealing from the artist, and the extreme, often fraudulent methods Gala uses to keep the money flowing. It would be nice if Briney could have summoned some kind of recognizable emotional reaction to that or anything else. Briney was apparently a last-minute replacement for Ezra Miller, who now appears as Young Dalí in flashbacks. While the guy who will appear as The Flash in a few weeks is apparently a malevolent weirdo in real life, at least he can kinda act. Briney drags down everyone around him, killing any momentum the film builds up from Kingsley and Sukowa’s terrifying love story.

The biggest problem with Dalíland is that you never get to see the artist’s paintings, only his eccentricities. Other people tell you how brilliant he is. Even though he was past his prime when James meets him, Dalí was the real deal. But unless you’re familiar with his work, and his biography, you won’t find that out from Dalíland.

Dalíland is playing at Malco Studio on the Square through June 15th and is available on VOD.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Chronicle of a Summer

Back in the days when I was a teenager

Before I had status and before I had a pager

You could find the Abstract listenin’ to hip-hop

My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop.

— “Excursions,” A Tribe Called Quest

It’s the summer of 1994. New York City private-school teenager and pot dealer Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) has a pager, all right, but he sure doesn’t have any status. He doesn’t have any friends, either — his only confidant is his psychiatrist and client, Dr. Jeff Squires (Ben Kingsley). Luke is cute and intelligent, but his thoughtfulness often looks and sounds like stoned slowness. He’s never had a girlfriend, although something may be brewing with Dr. Squires’ stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby).

Like a lot of urban-suburban white kids, Luke is more lonesome than depressed, and he combats his loneliness by immersing himself in hip-hop — the great 1990s hip-hop of the Native Tongues movement, Biggie Smalls, and the Wu-Tang Clan. Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness is much more than a pitch-perfect time capsule; it’s a coming-of-age story that’s preternaturally wise about music, sex, and teenagers.

Initially, Luke’s road to maturity and wisdom is hard to follow because Dr. Squires is such a strange, shifting guide, one who’s barely beyond adolescence in his own emotional development. Plus, Luke and Squires’ path is heavily strewn with 1990s signposts and gestures: Writing phone numbers on paper (rather than punching them into cell phones), grumbling about douche-bag mayor Rudy Giuliani, snorting Ritalin, and walking past Kurt Cobain memorials, Forrest Gump posters, Mary-Kate Olsen (only here she’s all grown up), and the World Trade Center are all part of Levine’s pop-cultural diorama.

These references aren’t held up for ridicule or cheap sentiment; they perform the same necessary function as the cigarette-smoking and three-martini lunches do in the terrific TV series Mad Men. They capture the mystery and fragility of the recent past.

The use of music throughout The Wackness — songs like Nas’ “The World Is Yours,” Raekwon’s “Heaven and Hell”, the Notorious B.I.G.’s “The What,” and, best of all, a Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It” — is also enlightening rather than nostalgic. What’s most amazing about these superbly chosen hip-hop tracks is the now-unmistakable air of tragedy and loss they all share. In a beautiful shift and stretch, though, the film’s romantic pinnacle turns on a visual cue to an ’80s song: After his first kiss, the concrete blocks under Luke’s feet light up à la Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video.

But as great as his musical allusions are, Levine’s handling of adolescent sex, shown through scenes that are tender and erotic without tumbling into exploitive jailbait fantasies, is even better. Stephanie is compassionate and understanding about the mechanics and (male) malfunctions of sex, but she’s not at all willing to deal with the messier emotional aftershocks. Her response to Luke’s declaration of love is a sudden, harsh “Whoa, dude.” It’s a tribute to The Wackness that Stephanie’s response is not portrayed as a condemnation of teenage girls. Like so much in this movie, it turns out to be strangely sweet and right.

The Wackness

Opening Friday, August 1st

Multiple locations