Passion flickers in Towne's take on angry novel 'Dust'

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 17, 2006 at midnight

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Robert Towne, a great and rightfully admired screenwriter, has been trying to make Ask the Dust for more than 30 years. Captivated by John Fante's emotionally propulsive novel, Towne endured false starts, studio indifference and disappointment as he attempted to bring Fante's work to the screen.

As I watched Ask the Dust, which was written and directed by Towne, I wondered if three decades isn't too long to nurture some dreams. Like a roast that's been overcooked, Ask the Dust seems to have been deprived of juice, namely the inner fury that inflamed Fante's novel.

Not that adapting Fante could have been easy. Fante, who hailed from Colorado, wrote four books revolving around a character named Arturo Bandini, a kind of Fante alter-ego. Bandini, who arrived in Los Angeles in the 1930s, aspired to be a writer as he struggled to overcome the prejudice he felt as an Italian kid growing up in Colorado.

Bandini seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of inner conflict, harboring residual religious feelings, carloads of guilt and an unquenchable desire to blast his way out of oblivion, using his typewriter to set the charge.

On the page, Ask the Dust fumes with Bandini's bigotry and sexual desire. Both come into play when Bandini - portrayed in the movie by Colin Farrell - meets Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican-American waitress.

The movie and the novel spend substantial time in the Bunker Hill rooming house where Bandini lives in near poverty, the rent perpetually overdue. Perhaps it's unfair to compare one's imagination with that of the director, but Farrell never struck me as the Bandini of the book.

Hayek, on the other hand, brings Camilla to fully realized life. She embodies both sexuality and a sense of defiance that makes you understand why Bandini can't get her out of his mind. Shackled by self-hatred and fear, he can't quite pursue her, either. He professes to have no understanding of women.

En route to consummating his love for Camilla, he has an affair with a woman who has seen him in one of the local bars. Idina Menzel plays Vera Rivkin, a Jewish woman who has washed up on L.A. shores. By taste and interest, she's probably a better match for Bandini than Camilla, but she's also scarred (literally), and Bandini winds up using her as a kind of gateway to sexual experience. She punches his ticket and he moves on - with some unexpected help from an earthquake.

Some of the book's characters, notably the bartender at the restaurant where Camilla works, have shrunk in importance. Some probably should have been jettisoned entirely, among them a seedy rooming-house drunk played by Donald Sutherland.

But those familiar with the book may be most struck by the way Towne turns the movie's final act into a kind of romantic idyll. Camilla and Bandini spend time relishing each other, although Camilla becomes a pot-smoking Camile, complete with ominous cough.

The novel's memorable and nearly unrelenting meanness starts to feel diluted, and Fante's bruising peculiarity gives way to a broader theme: a view of ethnics as outsiders, people eager to grab their share of the American dream. Camilla and Bandini both hunger for acceptance and aren't at all sure they'll get it - from the world or even from each other.For financial reasons, Towne was forced to take the production to South Africa, re-creating Los Angeles on a set constructed on a football field. With an able assist from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, he conveys a sense of Los Angeles as a kind of petri dish in which aspirants attempt to grow their dreams but often wind up with festering bacterial disasters.

Towne, who wrote the screenplays for Chinatown and The Last Detail, certainly has nothing to prove. He tells the story with confidence but doesn't find the necessary equivalent for Fante's passion. That may make it difficult for viewers to understand why Towne stuck with the project so long. Sadly, not every labor of love has a big-time payoff.

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