Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley) is one of the world’s most renowned surrealist painters.  Splitting his time in his later years between New York and Spain, the painter found it more and more difficult to pursue his art as his health deteriorated and his relationship with his wife and muse, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), became increasingly strained.  After being preoccupied with lavish parties and struggling to fill a gallery showing in New York, Dalí returns to Spain for the final time with his assistant, James (Christopher Briney), affectionately referred to as Saint Sebastian, but painful memories of the past will haunt the artist and keep inspiration at arm’s length until his eventual death in 1989. 

Mary Harron directs Dalíland, a fictional account of the surrealist’s final years penned by John Walsh which was distributed by Magnolia Films after its Toronto debut.  The 97-minute drama features impressive tit-for-tat performances by Kingsley and Sukowa while shedding light on some of the mysteries and controversies that plagued the painter and corrupted his legacy.  Chronicled through the eyes of ingenue, James, the film charts the final decade or so of Dalí’s life as a tragedy salved by the excess and extravagance that only his fame in the art world could afford him. 

James is our entry into the film, a mild-mannered country boy from Idaho transplanted into bustling New York City and a student of the arts.  It is a time-tested framing device of an acolyte entering into the world of a master, only to be overcome with disillusion as they are swallowed up whole by the ravenous industry they long to join.  Never meet your heroes, a lesson poor James learns all too late over the course of the film.  Briney does well as the doe-eyed admirer as he grows closer to the increasingly precarious Dalí.  Sent in as an infiltrator to force the maestro to put oil to canvas for the upcoming show, James finds himself allured and distracted by the drug and sex-fueled parties hosted in the fabled room 1610, toiling in Dalí’s chaperoned debauchery with the likes of Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) and Jeff Fenholt (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), but mostly he is struck by Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse), a frequent attendee to these parties.  Through Ginesta, we can begin to make sense of Dalí’s eccentricities as she answers James’ questions about his new employer while the two share post-coital cigarettes together. 

It is a shame that Walsh’s script leans so heavily on exposition, not only because it breaks the “show, don’t tell” rule of screenwriting, but it largely blocks Kingsley from the more exciting aspects of his performance.  He is allowed to play into some of the quirks, and he excels in the later scenes when Dalí is confronted by his own mortality, but for the majority of the film, his antics seem mostly to be oddity for the sake of oddity and do not feel rooted in anything.  Walsh does employ some flashback sequences in which Kinglsey and Briney witness the memories unfold like Ebenezer Scrooge and his fantôme de l’heure while – in a startling but thankfully brief appearance – Ezra Miller as the young Dalí terrorizes the young Gala (Avital Lvova) on the beach, setting into motion their tumultuous relationship.  It does help to drive home the codependency of the relationship, but does little else in the way of showing us why Dalí is the way that he is; after all, Ginesta has answered those questions some 40 minutes before so there is little left to learn. 

As if Harron was afraid to get a little weird with the film, Dalíland is so safely constructed that its form is in direct opposition to Dalí’s vibrant style.  There is nary a moment in the entire film that feels indulgent, rather it is all so stately and formal, presented in the blandest way possible and because it does not break the “rules” it is not bad to look at, but it feels at constant odds with its subject.  To try and outright mimic the pestering style of Luis Buñuel – himself portrayed in the film for a brief moment – would be a foley, but that the film does not even try to gleam passing inspiration in its aesthetic from the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Federico Fellini deprives the film of any inkling of style.  Apart from some costume choices for Kingsley’s representation of Dalí, there is very little here that is visually exciting; audiences are even deprived of the wonder of seeing the paintings on the big screen. 

To describe anything about Salvador Dalí as underwhelming seems strange, but Harron’s exposé is just that.  The film does not feel unnecessarily cruel to the artist who had fallen on some troubled times in his later years, but it also does not seem to hold him in that high a state of reverence either, so it is hard to decipher fact from apocrypha, a task further complicated by the fictional James’ meddling in the narrative.  Propelled by Kinglsey and Sukowa – who, once the initial shrewish notes of her character are grown accustomed to becomes a truly fascinating, beguiling, and tragic in her own right character to watch – they are held back by a script that desperately needed to be reevaluated for purpose and point of view before Dalíland went in front of the lens. Try as they might to elevate and contextualize the material, the film’s reliance on the passive James undermines their efforts at every junction.