By Matthew Moorcroft

Screw This

• Directed by Mary Harron
• Starring Ben Kingsley, Barbara Sukowa, Christopher Briney, Ezra Miller
• R

Watching Daliland is a bizarre experience, something that on paper should frankly be fitting for a movie that is seemingly about Salvador Dali. After all, the man was notoriously one of the weirdest men alive during his time, so a film that gets weird and out there with it’s content should feel right at home with the eccentric. However, the bizarreness comes from less of it’s content, and more simply on the direction they actually decide to take this.

Daliland is about not Salvador Dali, or at least if it is then it’s doing a piss poor job of it. No, Daliland is about what Mary Harron, or more likely John C. Walsh, thinks Salvador Dali is, which is a parody of his own being. Dali doesn’t act like a person in this, instead feeling like an SNL sketch version of him that somehow bungled his way into a feature length biopic that has a fictional assistant as the real lead of the film. While Dali’s bizarre behavior is documented to an extent, it’s always left up to interpterion on whether or not he was actually like this or played it up for reporters and his fans. The seems all over the place on it as well, but seemingly by the end decides “eh, maybe?” which isn’t really much of an answer. And that’s fine if the actual stuff leading to it was any interesting.

Daliland ultimately makes the same mistake that the ill-fated (and horrendous) Bohemian Rhapsody, which is turning an otherwise interesting and fascinating individual’s life into something boring, mundane, and standard. It’s a biopic without teeth even if it clearly wants to be, with director Mary Harron’s best work clearly elsewhere as she is not trying to salvage whatever script was given to her. The aforementioned self-insert assistant, as a lead, has an arc you’ve seen a thousand times before, and feels shoehorned in as a way to alievate the fact that they can’t bother to tell an interesting story with Dali. And there is a nugget there, mainly with the bizarre marriage and love life between him and his wife, but it’s so murky and feels like an afterthought that you almost forget about it until it suddenly wants to pop up from time to time.

Ben Kingsley at least looks like he’s having a ball, even if his take on Dali borders on parody at points. You can tell that he at least wants to give him some depth but nothing in the film is allowing him to truly soar. Most of his best moments are when he’s in quiet contemplation, mulling over his life and his actions, considering everything that’s happened to him. It’s in those brief, small moments you see a Dali that recognizes his own infallibility and flaws, but can’t move on from them as they define his public image. It’s a shame that instead he’s reduced to yelling and screaming and almost being comic relief in his own picture.

I find it hard to mostly say anything of substance on Daliland, but that’s a fault of the flick at this point. If the film has nothing to say, then why should I find something to say about it? It’s vapid, uninteresting, boring, and reads like somebody’s first Wikipedia synopsis of one of the more fascinating figures in art history. Don’t bother with this, stop making biopics like this for the love of god.