As a movie, however,

Writer-director Robert Towne (who scripted that most Byzantine of L.A. love letters, Chinatown) presumably sees a younger version of himself in Arturo Bandini, Fante's fictional counterpart -- the only reasoning I can muster to explain the film's noxiously romantic brand of nostalgia, which plays like bad film noir.

It would seem Towne is too much in love with the book to recognize its fundamental limitations as a film. Divorced of its urgency, Ask the Dust reduces to that woeful genre of writer's-block stories, movies such as Wonder Boys in which exasperated novelists scratch their heads for two long hours only to learn in the third act that they should ''write what they know'' (one of the things I admire most about Sideways is that the movie doesn't end with Paul Giamatti sitting down to write the events we've just witnessed -- even though the book does just that).

What Towne gets right, however, is the psychology of his young hero. Yes, Italian-American Bandini writes to exact intellectual revenge upon the bullies who humiliated him back in Denver, to leave his mark on the ages. But above all, he wants to impress the ladies he lacks the courage to approach. Brandishing his byline to indifferent girls, he proves that he's somebody.

Colin Farrell is all wrong for the part. You never buy him as a mild-mannered virgin, and yet he does his best to shave 10 years off his age and downplay his off-screen sex-god status (a prospect not aided in the slightest by a bare-naked romp in the surf with Salma Hayek). Towne is right to recognize that sexual mind games trump stories of writers writing any day, and so he recasts the novel as Bandini's affair with Hayek's character, a hardened Mexican waitress named Camilla Lopez.

It's a fascinating relationship -- raw, passionate and grounded in gestures of mutual antagonism. Camilla serves a cup of inferior coffee, and Arturo lashes back, putting down her beat-up huaraches and dumping the sludgy mix across the tabletop. Moments like these give us insight into the paradoxical psychology of human courtship, in which insecure men insult that which they want most.

But before long, the movie spins off into the fluffy realm of romantic fantasy. Fante would never approve, governed as he was by a crushing fear of phoniness. Too much of Ask the Dust feels like it was never lived, but just plum made up.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]