Daliland: Ben Kingsley hams it up as Salvador Dali
It seems strange that there hasn’t already been a big budget biopic of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. This is a man whose great masterpiece was his own life, from the moustache on his face to the guest-list at his famous parties.
Enter Sir Ben Kingsley, an actor who has never feared being overshadowed by a role. In Daliland he hams it up wonderfully as the ageing artist, clearly relishing the opportunity to check his subtlety at the studio door.
Set in 1970s New York City, Daliland focuses on the twilight years of the artist’s life, with occasional flashbacks to his youth courtesy of Ezra Miller. It’s told from the perspective of handsome young intern James Linton, a country boy plucked from his desk job by virtue of his chiselled jawline and thrown face first into Dali’s world of celebrity, sex and surrealism.
Director Mary Harron has long been fascinated by the corrosive nature of fame. Her first feature film, I Shot Andy Warhol, focused on Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who tried to assassinate the world’s most famous living artist. In the years since she has made biopics of American pin-ups Bettie Page and Anna Nicole Smith, two women who were chewed up and spat out by the mass media of their time. Harron returns to familiar territory here, scraping away the gilded veneer of Dali’s life to examine the seamy reality beneath.
This Dali is a wreck, obsessed by the idea of sex but unable to actually do it, settling for watching the hot young things of New York from behind a quivering curtain. When he’s not partying, Dali spends his time locked in an apartment, under strict instruction from his long-suffering, tyrannical wife Gala to paint them out of their mountain of debt. How else will the champagne keep flowing?
While there are similarities between this and Harron’s past work, Daliland is far less visceral, both literally and metaphorically. Linton acts as a buffer between the audience and the mad world Dali inhabits, making you feel like a tourist in the psychedelic 70s rather than a part of the action. Despite the subject matter it’s a surprisingly cosy period drama – I just can’t help wishing it were more.