There\u2019s a late-\u201980s episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche and Rose befriend two teenagers as part of the \u201cBe a Pal\u201d program. The young ladies want to go to a movie and Rose, bubbly as always, suggests a few options: \u201cWe can go see Oliver & Company. Or Roger Rabbit.\u201d To which one of the girls replies, \u201cOr Tequila Sunrise? I hear Mel Gibson takes his shirt off a lot.\u201d That more or less sums up Ask the Dust\u2014a film written and directed by \u201970s screenwriting icon, and Tequila Sunrise auteur, Robert Towne\u2014in which Colin Farrell dons and doffs a white athletic undershirt (one of those shorthand symbols of tortured masculinity marked by sweat stains and cigarette ash) with relatively rhythmic precision. And yet, Towne\u2019s film is all foreplay, the work of a pornographer more interested in narrative construction than in sex. Makes for pretty boring porn, though this is nothing new for Towne; indeed, it pretty much exemplifies the majority of his work, especially in his more recent role as scriptwriter-du-jour to superstar and Ask the Dust producer Tom Cruise. Recall how the unholy triumvirate of Towne, Cruise, and John Woo made Mission Impossible 2 a head-slappingly pathetic elegy to its protagonist\u2019s perfectly maintained coiffure and you\u2019ll get a sense of how the writer-director\u2019s ode to the City of Angels fatally derails.<\/p>\n
Based on the second of author John Fante\u2019s semi-autobiographical series of novels, Ask the Dust details the metaphor-laden love affair between struggling Italian-American author Arturo Bandini (Farrell) and Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek) with the couple embodying a hodgepodge of depression-era Los Angeles\u2019s racial, social, and political ills. It\u2019s L.A. Confidential as a romance instead of a murder mystery though this is not meant to devalue Fante\u2019s work (of which I\u2019ve only skimmed a few pages) so much as it is to criticize Towne\u2019s interpretation of it. By all accounts Fante is one of those hard-boiled eggs whose prose practically drips a uniquely male breed of cynicism and atmosphere masking a perpetually tormented emotional center\u2014it makes sense that Charles Bukowski, who helped to inaugurate Fante\u2019s posthumous popularity, was one of the author\u2019s dyed-in-the-wool fanatics. Towne is also a fan and was a friend of Fante, but his film replaces down-n-dirty with spit-n-polish.<\/p>\n
Things are off from Ask the Dust\u2019s intriguingly retro credit sequence, a floridly romanticized digital tracking shot into L.A.\u2019s long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood. The CG era has encouraged a lot of laziness in the \u201970s turks, the worst of whom view the computer as a stress-relieving tool as opposed to a singular point on the artistic palette. It nonetheless goes a way toward separating the chaff from the wheat and Towne, lacking the deep-rooted directorial psychosis of a De Palma or a Polanski, is most definitely chaff. (How long can one man piggyback on the success of Chinatown? The beat goes on\u2026) The film\u2019s press packet makes particular note of Towne\u2019s intimate knowledge of Los Angelean history, but as a director he seems to have more of a trivia buff\u2019s fascination. He knows where the buildings were, but can\u2019t for the life of him find the souls inside.<\/p>\n
He set himself quite a task by casting Farrell and Hayek in the lead roles, both superficial personalities who need a director attuned to their respective physicalities, able to match them up with the appropriate negative spaces. Farrell\u2019s boyishness is the furthest thing from hard-bitten and desperate; he seems pampered, like a jet-setting playboy off for a jaunt among the proles. He was a perfect John Smith in The New World because Terrence Malick focused more on his Popeye-like biceps in relation to Pocahontas\u2019s petite yet majestic innocence: a superbly physicalized symbol of one culture embracing, in ways assimilating, another. Farrell towered in The New World where in Ask the Dust he\u2019s reduced to a blank-faced cipher. Experience needs to graft itself onto Bandini\u2019s face so that, by the time the third-act TB heartbreak rolls around, the journey has been irrevocably etched. Farrell can\u2019t enact such regret under Towne\u2019s circumstances so he has to make do with those old shorthand standbys\u2014a monologue and a moustache.<\/p>\n
Hayek is slightly better though she\u2019s hard-pressed to transcend her character\u2019s status as a wilting, rose-red symbol. A climactic sequence set in a movie theater is meant to encapsulate all the destructive racial tensions of the time, but Hayek can do little more than indicate Camilla\u2019s pain, turning it into a signpost signifier that Towne, acting the camp queen, makes sure we notice by cutting in an (in)appropriate line of dialogue from the Joan Blondell film Dames. And \u201ccamp\u201d doesn\u2019t even begin to describe the two leads\u2019 love scenes, an embarrassment of chiaroscuro riches, centered around perfectly placed beams of moonlight, that play like a test reel for that infamous Michael Douglas ass shot in Basic Instinct. (Towne sees sex and love as a postmodern mixture of crashing waves and copious dissolves, with obscurantist shadows rendering each individual an anonymous huff-n-puff slab of meat.)<\/p>\n
With Donald Sutherland and Dame Eileen Atkins popping in now and again to mark time on the queue in paycheck purgatory, it falls to Idina Menzel, as the mentally unhinged Vera Rifkin, to inject some life into the proceedings. Towne treats her like a slab of meat too (the literal scars her character bears are shown only once as a kind of shock-tinged throwaway gag), but Menzel\u2019s theatrical training helps her to get out from under the creator\u2019s reductive kino-eye. She doesn\u2019t quite fit into this hermetically sealed Los Angeles (recreated on South African soundstages and locales by production designer Dennis Gassner) and that\u2019s a blessing in disguise. Ask the Dust takes flight whenever she\u2019s on-screen, which makes her sudden removal in a cheaply visualized earthquake (seemingly brought on by the killer worms from Tremors) all the more upsetting.<\/strong> Beyond that, Ask the Dust\u2019s most salient point of interest is the vocal casting of movie critic Richard Schickel as a paternalistic, advice-prone H.L. Mencken, a seemingly inspired choice, but one that quickly devolves due to Schickel\u2019s sonorous intonations, which are on par with the hagiographic, exhausted, and\/or condescending mannerisms his work typically exhibits. It\u2019s just one more illustration of the general lifelessness of Ask the Dust, which, when you get right down to it, is unforgivably dull as dishwater. Though that, it should be noted, is an insult to dishwater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a late-\u201980s episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche and Rose befriend two teenagers as part of the \u201cBe a Pal\u201d program. The young ladies want to go to a movie and Rose, bubbly as always, suggests a few options: \u201cWe can go see Oliver & Company. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[32,16],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-32","tag-ask-the-dust"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-lr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1330,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions\/1330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}