Movie Review: Robert Towne's Ask the Dust - Laughing at Your Own Funeral - Page 4

John Fante worked in the tradition of the expostulating modern bard, which includes Whitman, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski (who wrote the 1979 introduction to the copy I read). Consequently, the book centers more securely than the movie on Arturo's emergence as a published novelist. The love story feels secondary and is at times somewhat tiresome because Arturo and Camilla, who is masochistically in love with Arturo's rival, never seem as movie-ishly right-and-wrong for each other as Farrell and Hayek do.

This is the way in which the old-movie romantic Robert Towne brings so much to the project. As his script for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) still shows, Towne does haunted nostalgia better than anybody. Ask the Dust is another Los Angeles story about doomed lovers in the '30s, and Towne has given the book's dialogue a brilliant polish for the screen (including an exchange between Arturo and Camilla about the color of his eyes that is the best on the subject I can remember, and no less romantic for being bitter). Towne's love of the era and his tough-guy jocularity give everything a dark shine, including the quietly anguished episodes involving Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland), a drunk who cadges nickels off Arturo, and the garrulously anguished ones involving Vera Rivken (Idina Menzel), a mad literary groupie who stalks him.

The old-Hollywood combination of "sultry" and "funny" could make otherwise unremarkable stories like To Have and Have Not (1944) and Gilda (1946) teasingly memorable. You know that the villains will be vanquished and the lovers will end up together, but the oddly heterogeneous tone gives the story suspense on a different level: you never know how any scene will play. The story may be a political melodrama, but the characters interact with the bantering suggestiveness of a burlesque show. The pretense that the moviemakers are primarily interested in telling the story is perhaps hypocritical, but you can't take it seriously enough to resent it.

Towne's coke-dealer redemption romance Tequila Sunrise (1988), starring Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, runs more in this pop vein. By contrast, Ask the Dust, starting with Fante as its source, is a tragicomic romance that has both feet planted outside the world of movies, and fiction, too. In this movie, as we know from our family histories, the melting pot is not only an idealistic metaphor but a fact that is as hard to accommodate yourself to as any fact of life. Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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