Little Ashes

Before they were seminal figures of painting and literature and film, Salvador Dalí (Robert Pattinson), Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán) and Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) were just a few crazy (if well-dressed) college kids in 1920s Madrid, with heads and hearts full of big ideas about art and life and politics and sex. Their pre-civil-war love triangle is the inspiration for writer Philippa Goslett and director Paul Morrison’s unnecessarily mediocre movie, whose piety and prosaic emptiness seem like just the sort of stuff these artists so daringly opposed. But aside from a stiffly speculative and condescending cultural catechism, Little Ashes also offers a chance for Twilight fans to see their favorite vampire heartthrob embarrass himself. While his companions manage plausible readings of a gay-bashing Buñuel and a lovelorn García Lorca (and Marina Gatell ennobles her token-female role), Pattinson’s eye-bugging contortions and cringe-inducing accent do at least distract us from his apparent lack of any ideas about Dalí’s inner life.