A Salvador Dalì biopic by the director of American Psycho, why did i almost miss it?

Well, there’s actually a reason that this one didn’t make much waves, as it’s a surprisingly by the numbers, skin-deep biopic about Dalì’s later years.

Set primarly in 1973’s New York, the plot follows a young gallery intern, James, who gets to moonlight as an assistant in order to motivate and ensure Dalì will produce new paintings for a new collection, which lets him see the man behind the artist, one broken by a constant fear of looming death, his excessive lifestyle that drains him in both the lifeforce and the wallet, his tormented relationship with his wife Gala, plus his Parkinson growing worse and limiting his art as well.

It’s not a bad movie, Ben Kingsley as Dalì alone saves it from being terrible or whatever, but it feels like its going through the paces, not actually interested in trying to also explain (or even depict) Dalì’s art in correlation to anything, which is reasonable since his work is far from being unseen niche stuff, but it also seems extra irrelevant, even more since there’s barely any character that feel properly nourished, or – so to say – “real”.

Plus the final act seems in a sudden rush, for whatever reason now events that would have been given entire scenes minutes before….are not, so you get the cliffnotes for important character’s life events, maybe there would have been time if the movie didn’t almost spent more time fleshing out the audience surrogate character instead of Dalì or where Alice Cooper listens to Ted Neeley spell out he was the protagonist in Jesus Christ Superstar.

It’s a mediocre, run-of-the-mill biopic, but it’s watchable, arguably inoffensive as well… which is kinda depressing in a way.