97 min | NR | June 9, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures
A young assistant lands a job in the orbit of an aging Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala, where the art is a sideshow to the cash and the chaos. Ben Kingsley plays the master as a man who has turned himself into a brand and forgotten the difference. The wild surrealist deserves a wilder movie than this.
James is a young gallery assistant assigned to manage Salvador Dalí during the artist’s final productive years in New York. He gets pulled into a court of hangers-on, lovers, and hustlers who feed off the Dalí name. The film positions itself as a story about an outsized genius. It is actually a story about money and the machinery that converts a signature into product. Mary Harron builds the whole thing around the assistant’s wide eyes, and that choice keeps the most interesting figure at arm’s length.
Ben Kingsley plays Dalí as a performer who never steps offstage. He delivers the mustache-twirling theater the public expects and lets exhaustion leak through in the quiet moments. Barbara Sukowa plays Gala Dalí as the real operator, transactional and hungry, working the younger men while she works the books. She is the most dangerous person in every room she enters. Christopher Briney plays James as a blank, and the blankness is the problem. The audience watches the spectacle through a character with no inner life of his own.
Mary Harron directs from a script she wrote with John C. Walsh, and the structure betrays the subject. Dalí built a career on rupture and provocation, but the film files his life into the tidy beats of a standard biopic. The production design dresses the parties in period luxury and renders them inert, all surface and no menace. Harron stages the decadence at a polite distance, when the material demands she get inside it. The flashbacks to a young Dalí and Gala interrupt the present without deepening it.
This is a movie about a surrealist that refuses to be surreal. It treats a man who weaponized strangeness as a costume drama with a famous wig. Kingsley and Sukowa supply the menace and decay the writing will not, and the film keeps cutting away from them to follow a bystander. The contradiction at the center, a wild artist contained inside a conventional frame, never resolves into anything. Harron sands the edges off Dalí until what remains fits comfortably into a shape he spent his life rejecting.