‘Dalíland’ Review: Harron’s Latest is an Uneventful Slog
Ben Kingsley and Barbara Sukowa give impassioned performances in Dalíland, an otherwise dull film that gives little insight into the mad genius of Salvador Dalí.
In many ways, late-stage Salvador Dalí was the artist at his most interesting and daringly provocative. Mary Harron’s Dalíland chronicles the late-stage life of Dalí (Ben Kingsley/Ezra Miller), which means it has all of the ingredients for a successful film. It chronicles this era through the eyes of James (Christopher Briney), who manages Dalí’s collection and upcoming exhibitions with his boss, Christoffe (Alexander Beyer). One day, Dalí plucks him from Christoffe’s office and asks him to be his assistant, which he accepts. As he gets to know more about Dalí and his wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), he starts to be drawn to his freewheeling style and tormented genius while also having feelings for Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse), who frequently models for Dalí’s paintings.
Kingsley plays Dalí in a “present-day” setting, whilst Miller portrays Dalí in flashbacks. Miller is barely in the movie, appearing for a total of perraps ten minutes, in three short scenes where Dalí tells James how he met Gala, how they fell in love, and how they solidified it. Are those scenes essential to the film? Not really. It’s perfectly clear that the two still have feelings for one another, even if Gala feels more passionately towards Jeff Fenholt (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), the star of Jesus Christ Superstar. Their relationship doesn’t develop itself more through the flashbacks because audiences can grasp everything going on by looking at how they treat each other in the present. One scene perfectly encapsulates how their feelings are buried deep in their minds but are still there when needed. During the opening of Dalí’s latest exhibit, the two have an argument over Gala’s relationship with Fenholt, with his wife pushing Dalí in frustration. She apologizes as soon as he’s on the floor, and the two reconcile and get closer to when they were before.
Kingsley and Sukowa perform with great dignity and compassion, allowing the audiences to penetrate Dalí and Gala’s psyches. Dalí’s mind is always ever-changing, but Kingsley understands what makes the enigmatic Dalí who he is, whilst Miller’s portrayal of the artist is completely forgettable. In light of recent events surrounding Ezra Miller, it would’ve been best for these scenes to be cut out of the film entirely. If they were important to the story, it would be understandable that Harron and the studio decided to keep them in. However, they’re completely unimportant to the emotional progression of the characters and how the audience will perceive Dalí. The movie’s main focus is late-stage Dalí and how he perceives art and the people around him, and not early-stage Dalí, to which these scenes feel like they belong in a completely different movie than what “present-day” scenes set up.
But the finished product is ultimately uninteresting. A film about Dalí from an external point of view seems to misunderstand what made Dalí fundamentally who he was, and feels too detached from the character to have a legitimate connection with him and the audience whom they should attach themselves to James, and not Dalí. The film feels too conventional and empty, as a Dalí character study, or even as a study of his mad genius from an admirer, to feel like it holds any dramatic weight or something tangible for the audience to invest themselves for 97 minutes. It feels like it focuses on the wrong aspects of Dalí’s portrait instead of devoting its attention to the film’s central focus.
For instance, James’ relationship with Ginesta adds nothing to the film or the character. As talented as Suki Waterhouse is (and lord knows she is very talented if you’ve seen Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & the Six), she is completely wasted playing a character whose presence doesn’t do anything to James and completely disappears from the picture as their relationship was starting to get interesting. But it also re-treads arc audiences have seen so many times before in plenty of formulaic biopics that the masses haven’t remembered.
And it’s exactly where Dalíland will ultimately end up: forgotten as soon as it is released. Of course, releasing a movie starring Ezra Miller will ensure no one will see it, but they’re barely in the movie and could’ve been easily cut out of it without any of the pieces from the main story missing. But even without those scenes, the movie still fails to garner any interest in who Dalí is and why he had such a wild outlook on life and art. If that fails, then everything else inevitably will.