The worst choice Mary Harron makes in Dalíland is relying on convention to make an end-stage portrait of an unconventional figure. Salvador Dalí was, and this is putting it mildly, a weirdo. He took his life seriously in that he took the world seriously; he put seemingly all the world into his work by using just about every artistic medium available–painting, photography, sculpture, cinema–while stuffing his output with just about every artistic theme available to him–sex, machinations of the subconscious, spirituality and religion, science, dreams. On the other hand, he walked around wearing a cape and a handlebar mustache, the stuff of 19th century parody.
Dalí was–is–a figure larger than life, whose reputation has outlived him and made him effectively immortal, and whose image is so striking that it could, and should, occupy real estate in a standalone film. Dalíland is not that film. Dalíland is hardly even Dalí’s film. The guide on Harron’s meandering tour through the great Spanish surrealist’s days is James (Christopher Briney), an art world aspirant and Dalí superfan, met in 1985 at the start of the film watching a news bulletin about the fire that left Dalí (Ben Kingsley) hospitalized in 1984. (The gap between the incident and the televised report goes uncommented on.) James has dreams and ambitions, but Dalíland starts out after they’ve been long-dashed, so Harron hits the rewind button back to the 1970s, both to indulge in the period’s excesses and to revisit the moment James and Dalí meet.
It’s bullshit, of course. James isn’t a real person. In fact, straight-laced and fresh-faced as he is in the shadow of Dalí’s eccentric showmanship, James reads as immediately and recognizably fake. Dalíland isn’t the first biopic to make up a whole human being; the good ones do, like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and especially the bad ones do, like Bombshell or The Greatest Showman. But in Dalíland, the fabrication is not only unnecessary, but unwelcome, because Dalí is the kind of subject who doesn’t require the aid of a constructed audience stand-in. In fact, the very invention dilutes the effect of his inscrutable, exhausting genius. You might rather have a guide to introduce you to Dalí, but you will find, by Dalíland’s conclusion, that you’d have been better off learning how to swim in the deep end.
Dalíland is plotless for the most part, following James through Dalí’s New York City ecosystem at first as he prepares for his next exhibition by not preparing at all; Dalí parties and carouses instead, while James makes acquaintances with his inner circle, like his manager, John Peter “Captain” Moore (Rupert Graves), his muses, like Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic) and “Ginesta” (Suki Waterhouse), if indeed that is her real name, and Gala (Barbara Sukowa), Dalí’s wife, played and written as a severe, forbidding grand dame distrustful of interlopers like James. It’s quite a stew of glitzy, quirky characters writer John C. Walsh has got going here, though we’re not afforded much opportunity to get to know them or understand their motivations. They’re all treated like remoras, latching onto Dalí for their sustenance and survival, rather than like people.
Maybe there’s some truth to the way Harron positions her supporting characters as pseudo-parasitic. It’s a trope, but an earned one, that people of stratospheric fame and achievement invariably end up with their share of hangers-on, people siphoning off portions of their wealth for their own benefit. But this is an incredibly dull narrative for Dalíland to explore when Harron has Kingsley’s scene-chowin’ performance as the man himself, befuddled and bizarre, a titan of the arts out of time in several senses: He’s in the winter of his life, and he’s slowly losing his commercial allure, having frittered away his millions on self-satisfaction and Gala’s cravings, with only phony lithographs waiting in the wings as potential income. But Kingsley does as Dalí would have: He sallies on ahead as if unburdened by cares, inhaling his surroundings and exhaling melodrama and brilliance.
Kingsley’s alive here, and in touch with Dalí’s essence to such a degree that James’ presence in Dalíland is completely inexplicable. Briney doesn’t have much to do, and he doesn’t have a lot of tools in his belt to do the “not much” with–one or two rotating facial expressions that never quite convey what they should, and an unfailingly cavalier body language as if he’s not impressed to be audience and companion to a god. (Well, a self-proclaimed god.) A better movie would’ve honed in on Dalí and Gala, their marriage, their love, their enmity, and all of the conflicting emotions that made up their coupling; it might also have excised flashbacks where Ezra Miller plays Dalí with the same blank inelegance that Briney plays James, though this would rob us of a clever scene where Dalí conceives of and paints The Persistence of Memory. (Harron doesn’t show it. She just shows Gala, played in youth by Avital Lvova, staring at it on an easel kept off-screen. It’s up to the viewer to remember what the painting looks like. Zing!)
That version of Dalíland would be an entirely different movie, of course, and so as not to judge the movie for what it isn’t, what it is is entirely unsatisfying and frankly normal. Dalí’s part in his own story is as an object, filtered through the lens of a protagonist who didn’t even exist. There’s almost a certainty that he’d hate seeing his career and his days compressed into another artist’s interpretation, conducted through the perspective of someone who wasn’t even real.
Director: Mary Harron
Writer: John C. Walsh
Starring: Christopher Briney, Ben Kingsley, Barbara Sukowa, Suki Waterhouse, Rupert Graves, Andreja Pejic, Avital Lvova, Ezra Miller
Release Date: June 9, 2023
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.