Little Ashes (2008)

I'm sure I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the worst thing a movie can do is be boring. Not matter what else you do, if you can't get the audience to pay attention, you've got nothing.

It's unclear exactly how writer Philippa Goslett and director Paul Morrison couldn't find a single interesting element in the lives of Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), Salvador Dalí (Robert Pattinson), and Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty). Talented and passionate artists forged, in part, in fascism and war, so let's . . . put a tragic love story in the centre. Okay, that might not be so bad.

It wouldn't be, again, if it weren't so boring. Often in fiction, the best romances are forbidden, and the hottest relationships are unconsummated. Here we have one that's both, but it's never possible to get swept up, in part, because the characters never do. Lorca and Dalí should be consumed by an overwhelming passion that drives them to break the rules, but all it really leads to is poetry (sexy?) and some unexplained combination of brattiness and psychological dysfunction* (weird).

Part of it is that Beltrán holds back while forgetting to suggest that his character is the one holding back. Emily pointed out that saying all his lines as though he is in physical pain just seems to be Pattinson's acting style, and, while we agreed that is makes a certain amount of sense for Edward, it makes a certain amount of sense here, too. I think he's trying to suggest the difficultly in expressing anything, especially anything that might be approaching truth, when one is so dedicated to artifice. Of course, the problem is that's what I think he's trying to suggest. That could just be how he acts.

Mostly, though, it all just seems like a waste of McNulty, whose momentary teary-eyed realization of the affair is possibly the best acted moment in the entire production. Morrison, I loved Solomon and Gaenor, but I think I might have just been high on the Gruffudd factor. Tragic love stories may have seemed your thing, but this time you disappoint. C-

*By which I only mean that he is portrayed as having some sort of mental problem.