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More Light Than Heat
“When I first met him,” says costume
designer Albert Wolsky about Ask the Dust star Colin Farrell, “he
had long hair and was wearing those grungy jeans. After they took
him into hair and makeup, and he put on the suit I’d made,
he was transformed into a young man living in the Thirties.”
There are many individual pleasures to be found in Robert Towne’s
Ask the Dust, and one of the most satisfying comes in watching Farrell
take yet another character who couldn’t be more removed from
who and what the actor himself is and make that character so solid
and real and grounded that watching him isn’t like watching
an actor at work but like making a new acquaintance. Not quite like
making a new friend, at least not in the case of Arturo Bandini,
the hungry, naive young Italian-American writer Farrell (Alexander,
S.W.A.T.) plays in Dust, for Arturo isn’t a real warm guy,
nor is he terribly likeable: he’s vain and petty and angry
and bitter and one of those young men who’s so much younger
than he is but believes he’s so very wise. He’s not
a particularly pleasant person, but he is fascinating, not because
of hair or makeup or costuming -- no disrespect to the very fine
production team here -- but because Farrell layers Arturo’s
immaturity with an anxious vulnerability, a terrible fear that the
nagging suspicions Arturo has about his own inadequacies might actually
be true. Farrell pulls off here what is unfortunately all too rare
in film acting: he understands the character he’s playing
better than the character himself, and he uses that knowledge to
spin a bit of movie magic.
That’s a good thing, because Dust is based on the novel of
the same name by John Fante, and both novel and movie are very much
a character study of Arturo, who was, apparently, very much a stand-in
for Fante. The misery of being a creative person desperate to make
a mark on the world with one’s art, combined with the barely
tamped-down panic that one has nothing genuine to offer, is all
over the film, and so Robert Towne -- best known for his script
for Chinatown, he adapted the novel and directed -- has, at least
in that respect, given Fante a worthy little memorial in the film.
But another element of movie magic is missing, and it’s an
essential one. Movies can get away with not having among their casts
actors as intense and dedicated as Farrell, but they succeed when
they generate that ineffable alchemy in which all the elements work
together to become greater than the mere sum of their parts, when
everything catches fire and blazes to life. That Ask the Dust never
catches fire is a mystery, and a tragedy: you sense that it’s
on the verge of greatness, and it’s a frustrating exercise
trying to figure out why it ultimately fails.
There’s palpable chemistry, for instance, between Farrell
and Salma Hayek (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids 3-D: Game
Over) as Camilla, the Mexican waitress he can’t help but fall
for. Hayek is a firecracker, and Camilla is hot and sweet and sexually
dangerous to the inexperienced Arturo. (To think of the, um, storied
Farrell convincingly portraying a shy, blustering virgin gives me
delicious shivers of appreciation for his talent.) The world in
which they live, Los Angeles in the depths of the Great Depression,
is rife with bigotry and suspicion of their “kinds,”
the “wop” and the “spic,” and how that drives
the aversion to each other -- they both have dreams of marrying
“real” “Americans” (ie, rich blonds) as
a way of elevating their sorry stations -- that overlays their powerful
attraction is beautifully portrayed: it comes out in a kind of neo-noir
snappishness, a witty, sexy aggression that shows off how formidable
Farrell and Hayek are as performers.
There’s Donald Sutherland, turning in perhaps his second
best performance ever (after last year’s Pride & Prejudice)
as Arturo’s withered neighbor in a shabby Bunker Hill boardinghouse.
There’s Idina Menzel as the lonely woman who idealizes the
romanticism of Arturo’s work and pursues his affections --
that whole sequence, kudos to Towne, has an air of fantasy about
it, as if it were Arturo’s fevered writerly imaginings about
women and sex. There’s the stunning re-creation of Bunker
Hill, built, apparently, on a high-school soccer field in Cape Town,
and the gorgeous muted palette of Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography
that evokes sun and dust and heat.
But, alas, all the heat is there in the glare of the Los Angeles
sun. There’s no one to blame for how Ask the Dust never becomes
greater than the sum of its many great parts. It simply never generates
the gravity to ignite.
viewed at a private screening with an audience of critics
rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2006/03/ask_the_dust_review.html
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