It’s a shame that Ezra Miller has become better known for off-screen controversy than on-screen performances. Their brief stint as a younger Salvador Dalí blazes up the screen in Mary Harron’s biopic.
Harron is the brilliant director of American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page and I Shot Andy Warhol. Daliland is an entertaining if disappointingly formulaic entry into the Harron canon. The screenwriter John Walsh allows the older Dalí (Ben Kingsley) to wander in and out of the Miller-led flashbacks, a device that doesn’t always work, even if the actors remain sure-footed.
The film opens in 1973 in New York, where the artist and his formidable wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), entertain Alice Cooper, Amanda Lear, Donyale Luna, endless starlets and even more hangers-on.
James (Christopher Briney), a young gallery assistant whom Dalí dubs Saint Sebastian, quickly falls under the artist’s spell and into the bed of Lucy (Suki Waterhouse), one of a squadron of beautiful people who lurk decorously around the parties and orgies.
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Money is an issue, not least because Gala has taken Jeff Fenholt, the preening breakthrough star of the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar, as a lover.
Squabbling scenes between Kingsley and Sukowa make the enterprise worthwhile, but there are too many exchanges that attempt to shoehorn in backstory and context and even more fudges, most notably around Dalí’s sexual proclivities.
The literal rendering of Dalí’s explanation for The Persistence of Time – that the clocks look like melting Camembert cheese – is fun, if silly. A flim-flam operation concerning lithographs in Spain, orchestrated by Dalí’s British majordomo (Rupert Graves) adds a welcome capering dimension.
Liverpool does a valiant job as a stand-in for New York, but one can’t help but feel we are some distance from Daliland.
Daliland is on limited release and on digital platforms
