A Tribute to Mary Harron + “Dalíland”

It’s best to depict egomaniacs, even talented ones like Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley, gloriously chewing scenery), through the eyes of someone in their orbit but not their headspace. Someone like art-school dropout James (Christopher Briney), a handsome young man working for an NYC gallery in the mid-’70s who is asked to deliver money to Dalí and his wife Gala (an imperious Barbara Sukowa) and is soon swept into their world of parties filled with beautiful people and copious substances. Director Mary Harron is the perfect director for this subject matter, with an unerring eye for period detail and novel ways of looking at real celebrities from various cultural zeitgeists. Newcomer Briney deftly portrays the wide-eyed, game-for-anything James while Kingsley and Sukowa lay bare the roots of an obsessive and dysfunctional marriage between two extraordinary narcissists.

Tribute

A Canadian by birth and raised in London, Mary Harron was a journalist before she became a filmmaker, writing for Punk, where among her scoops was getting the first interview with The Sex Pistols for an American magazine. In time, she would become a presenter and director of the BBC arts series The Late Show. Her first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, captured the zeitgeist of 1960s and of the artist’s legendary studio, The Factory. Her next film was equally striking, a stylish, edgy adaptation of Bret East Ellis’ bestselling novel American Psycho (2000), followed by her glorious evocation of the pin-up era, The Notorious Bettie Page (2005). For television, she examined the life of a notorious model with the biopic Anna Nicole (2013) and directed the miniseries of Alias Grace (2017), an adaptation Margaret Atwood’s novel exploring the life of a 19th-century murderess, penned by Sarah Polley, winner of the 2022 SFFILM Award for Storytelling. More recently, she explored the motivations of Manson Family members in Charlie Says (2018).