Turning real people into characters for stage or screen is a difficult task, far more tricky than merely writing a biography, and the risk shows again in "Little Ashes," opening today. Philippa Goslett’s screenplay gives us poet-playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, artist Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Bunuel as 20-somethings, still very wet behind the ears, as college students in Madrid, in 1922.
Without a great deal of life experience, the three talented young men have little to share with us except their dreams, and Goslett is not nearly a writer of the talent of Tom Stoppard, whose play, "Travesties," involves a similar meeting of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara.
Robert Pattinson, the heart-throb star of the "Twilight" series, is properly flamboyant and
over the top as Dali, with Javier Beltran and Matthew McNulty far less impressive as Lorca and Bunuel, respectively. Paul Morrison’s direction is rather stolid, but the film’s major shortcoming is in the screenplay, where Goslett turns this trio of brilliant men into two-dimensional movie characters.
Madrid offers some nice travelogue shots, however.
At the Tivoli.
-Joe