Dalíland review – surrealist biopic paints Ben Kingsley into a corner

Mary Harron’s frustratingly elusive Salvador Dalí portrait has a persuasive central turn but its star has little to get his teeth into

How do you create a revealing and intimate portrait of someone who is forever playing a self-created role? How do you find something that is honest in a character who is composed of onion layers of artifice? It’s a problem with which writer-director Mary Harron wrestles in her latest film, an account of a late period in the life of the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, and one that she fails to resolve entirely. The Dalí persona, the film argues, was as much an artistic creation as any of his paintings. Dalí was something to be experienced rather than someone to be known.

This is all very well, but it doesn’t exactly give Ben Kingsley much to get his teeth into in the central role. The way this film approaches him, Dalí is a character who is worn, like a velvet smoking jacket and a jewel-encrusted fez, rather than someone who can be explored and inhabited. Kingsley is persuasive, in as much as he plays the ostentatious role that Dalí created for himself at least as convincingly as the artist himself did. But the glimpses of the man beneath all the showboating are rare.