Review: Ask the Dust

Robert Towne's first film in several years is a return to the lazy, adolescent Los Angeles of Chinatown, about three generations before the city's cruel heat and the drag forces of its ethnic whirlpool would cause the residents to begin crashing into each other at high velocities. The exact year of the film's events is in question, but we can deduce 1934 from an early scene in which Salma Hayek's character, a Mexican immigrant named Camilla, sits with jaw clenched in a darkened theater watching the Busby Berkeley musical Dames, as Ruby Keeler shouts out with abandon "I'm free, white and twenty-one and I love to dance!" Before the end of Ask the Dust's first reel, the heroine with the Wounded Pride will meet the hero with the Frustrated Ambition, in the form of Colin Farrell as a down-to-his-last-buffalo-nickel writer, and a tortured romance will begin. In smelting together pat cliches of ethnic tension and romantic staples that would have jerked yawns out of 1930s audiences, director Towne - this film is his reward from producer Tom Cruise for scripting Days of Thunder - has created a film that should, at least, please himself. Solipsistic vanity projects rarely disappoint the maker.

Towne has kept the Ask the Dust project on life-support for decades, while the reputation of the source book's author, John Fante, has waned as audiences expressed a desire for more aggressive interpretations of Los Angeles history, like L.A. Confidential. Ask the Dust is mostly unconcerned with crime and noir conventions. It's more of a Portrait of an Artist story, which makes it rare by comparison in American movies, but not so rare that we should give it a pass whether or not it succeeds. Not having read the book, I'm in no position to say whether the male protagonist, struggling author Arturo Bandini, measures up on the page, but on screen he comes across as flatly two-dimensional and strangely self-absorbed, despite an honest effort by Colin Farrell. As a self-described worshipper of H.L. Mencken who longs to write for The American Mercury magazine and even carries on an unlikely correspondence with the great journalist, it would seem natural for the character to express some opinions on the issues of the day or state an ambition beyond the desire to be a "great novelist." His favorite subject, however, seems to be himself.

Perhaps, though he combed the novel for character points, Robert Towne didn't dare insert anything too intellectually weighty into his screenplay before submitting it. Perhaps he kept in mind this bit of wisdom from Mencken, about the average reader: "He is not at all responsive to purely intellectual argument, even when its theme is his ultimate benefit, for such argument quickly gets beyond his immediate interest and experience. But he is very responsive to emotional suggestion." Emotional suggestion is available by the truckload in Ask the Dust, and characters are given handicaps for no other purpose than to give us a reason to root for them. Salma Hayek's Camilla is said to be illiterate, but somehow she's able to hold her own in complex, abstract conversations with a practiced intellectual, a writer. When we see her struggling with a Dick and Jane-level book late in the film, it nearly brings the story to a screeching halt because it doesn't feel realistic. The character of Vera, played by Broadway star Idina Menzel, is a Hollywood hanger-on who begins to follow Bandini around and eventually shows him that she hides horrible scars underneath her clothes. Get it? She's been scarred by life.

Colin Farrell, in refusing to go down the Jack Nicholson road of simply playing a gradation of his own personality in every role, makes a success of most of his performances. He does some good acting here, but there's just not much meat on the bone for him to chew. Aside from his portrayal, there are two characters - unfortunately the ones with the briefest roles - that stand out as pieces of good acting. Donald Sutherland plays a grizzled, shell-shocked World War I veteran who lives in the same fleapit hotel as Bandini and routinely wanders into his room. He seems to need to bear down and concentrate before he can come through with even the simplest thoughts, thanks to being gassed in the war. Justin Kirk plays Sammy, a local whose quiet demeanor hides his numerous and colorful opinions about women and in particular, how to deal with a "pony" who "spits the bit." That most of the characters routinely show up in Arturo's hotel room might be consistent with the novel but it begins to draw attention to the shoddiness of the production values after a while. With all of old Los Angeles now gone with the wind, the film was shot on location in Cape Town, South Africa; a little more camera exploration outdoors would have done the story some good.

There's probably some Roger Ebert Dictionary rule about how no one ever coughs by accident in a movie, and by the time one of the characters in this film begins dropping coughs in between sentences, it should be agonizingly clear how things will turn out, if you've ever seen a movie before. Ask the Dust is, on some level, just uninterested in its own characters. It throws Mencken and some strained prose at us to convince us that Arturo Bandini is a three-dimensional character, but Los Angeles is really the only thing on the director's mind. He wants to take us on a tour of pleasures in a lost city. What he should have known is that it's hard to enjoy the little details when you're wincing from the aftertaste of unvarnished melodrama. Oh well. Someone was determined that this project would be made, and now it has been made, and Robert Towne can be escorted back to his basement office at Cruise/Wagner headquarters. Those last-minute punch-ups of MI:3 aren't going to write themselves.