Little Ashes

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 23, 2009

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Were you aware that before he was a bulging-eyed, wax-mustachioed celeb artiste, Salvador Dalí was a painfully shy, would-be fop prone to puppy-dog crushes that wouldn’t look out of place on Degrassi High? Behold Little Ashes, a super-speculative, super-risible account of the young, prefame surrealist and his purported dalliance with gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The problem isn’t that the film tries to normalize Dalí; the great and famous shouldn’t be iconicized out of the human race. But this incompetent film is a smug and reductive offensive against its star subject.

As played by Twilight twerp Robert Pattinson, Dalí begins as a painfully, painfully, painfully meek student who trades blink-heavy gazes with the equally shy Lorca (Javier Beltran). Cue interrupted snogs and homoerotic moonlit swims staged as though irony never happened.

But for Dalí this is as much a stage as his Catholic period. As scribe Philippa Goslett sees it, Dalí grew into a frivolous sell-out artist-whore who sublimated his own gay desires for fame and fortune. Meanwhile, Lorca held onto his beliefs and was honorably martyred.

Which may be true, but such simplistic hypothesizing is not only anathema to art but, more important, a total snore to sit through. Little Ashes plods along with its self-satisfied Dalí attack for two punishing hours.

This would be a mere waste of time were it not for the trainwreck that is its lead performance by Robert Pattinson.

It’s customary for an actor’s recent, oft-embarrassing film work to be unleashed post-stardom; Little Ashes seems to have been released out of spite. No secret Brad Pitt he. In his chance to deliver a grand performance (or at least a cocktail party-worthy impersonation), the emperor reveals he has no clothes. (Sometimes literally; you’re welcome, teenage girls.)

As the early, unformed Dalí, he’s a total charisma vacuum, sucking the air out of each scene simply by standing there, gawkily. Once Dalí has grown up and grown out his ‘stache, Pattinson becomes a whole other kind of horrible. An unsightly ham flailing about, he’s akin to a junior school kid trying to play Stanley Kowalski.

This singular embarrassment aside, the only thing of interest is listening to a cast of Spanish actors struggling to speak English alongside an English actor struggling to maintain a single accent—any accent. Sometimes he sounds American. But how? D
 

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Posted Jun. 23, 2009 | Comments: 0