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The title suggests an amusement park, and the story promises to be a wild ride — or at least, it should be. The story is framed around a fictional, baby-faced assistant named James (Christopher Briney), who in 1974 is recruited from a New York gallery to help the aging genius prepare for a big upcoming show. As James is led into a posh hotel room to meet Dalí, as everyone calls the painter (never Salvador), a man announces, “Welcome to DalíLand!”
What wonders must be about to unfold. What art-world debauchery must be about to ensue.
But what James encounters when he walks through those doors isn’t the stuff of legend, but a tepid costume party.
The characters should be colorful: beautiful, androgynous model Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic); shock-rocker Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna). A needle drop of Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s “Make Me Smile” does, well, make you smile. But as a slice of the mid-1970s art life, it’s not terribly convincing.
The lack of energy is nothing short of mystifying, given the talent on hand. Kingsley resists the urge to camp up his character: All you need is to take one look at that signature mustache on the English actor’s mug and you’ve got instant surrealist. Dalí’s wife, Gala, is played by German actress Barbara Sukowa, whose career goes back to the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and who has plenty of authority herself. And Harron’s early features — “I Shot Andy Warhol,” “American Psycho” — once showed a sharp, thoughtful vision.
Alas, nobody comes off well here. Harron, whose career arguably reached its nadir with her 2013 made-for-cable movie about Anna Nicole Smith, is for the most part uninspired behind the camera, with large sections of “DalíLand” playing like a mildly risqué sitcom. Kingsley certainly looks the part, but other than that, he isn’t given much to work with. Sukowa seems to have been encouraged to overact, perhaps overcompensating for the film’s general listlessness. The vapid Briney, for his part, is a blank slate: a pretty boy who navigates Dalí’s wonderland with wide eyes and a willingness to get swept up in a vivid dream.
One big problem with that dream: It just isn’t that colorful — at least not in a way that communicates to a 21st-century audience how much of an iconoclast its subject, who died in 1989, was. Maybe the times have overtaken Dalí, what with immersive art “experiences” turning the kind of creativity that once seemed like divine invention into selfie-friendly kitsch.
“DalíLand” isn’t even very satisfying as cheesy spectacle. There’s a brief glimmer of camp in one scene where Dalí corrals models to bare their bottoms to make what, in a family publication, might be called bum prints. (Never mind that Yves Klein was doing something similar in the early 1960s.) The messy process is set, oddly enough, to the Spinners’ 1973 R&B hit “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love.” It’s so incongruous it kind of works, connecting the creative impulse with romantic euphoria. That spirit is missing throughout most of “DalíLand” — a kind of playful illogic that fuels the best surrealism.
Mostly, the film’s worst sin is that it’s boring, even when it’s trying to tell, for example, the origin story of the melting pocket watches in Dalí’s 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory.” In a flashback featuring a young Dalí (Ezra Miller) — a flashback that, paradoxically, seems sharper than the primary action — the painter sees a wheel of melting brie cheese and connects it to the shape of a timepiece.
We never see the finished canvas, among the most famous of the artist’s paintings. But we do hear Gala’s reaction to it: “No one who has seen this painting will ever forget it.” That may be true, but sadly, no one who has seen “DalíLand” will remember it long past the closing credits.
Unrated. At the Cinema Arts Theatre; also available on Apple TV Plus, Prime Video, Google Play and YouTube. Contains strong language, nudity and sexual situations. 104 minutes.
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