Ask The Dust (2006)

Rating: ***1/2

Director: Robert Town

Starring: Collin Farrell, Salma Hayek

Review: Robert Towne returns to 1930s Los Angeles, but this time it’s a sepia-tinged, down-on-its-heels Bunker Hill, downtown, rather than the grittier “Chinatown.”

The film adapts John Fante’s celebrated novel about a struggling writer hoping to wrest the Great American Novel from sunbleached Los Angeles, and to legitimize his swarthy Italian pedigree by plucking a wife from the rich blonde orchards of California beauties. Instead he finds writer’s block and a halting love affair with a waitress as eager to unload the burden of her Mexican birth as he is to achieve honorary WASPhood.

The first hurdle you’re asked to clear with this film is Colin Farrell as a guy who has no luck with women. If you manage that, deal with Salma Hayek as a low-grade waitress. Better paid reviewers than me will lament this, but c’mon, that’s how Hollywood works. The ugliest leading actor in the last ten years was Charlize Theron in bad makeup. Everything in Hollywood is prettier than real life except Jack Nicholson, and he’s got charisma.

So deal with it, or stick to documentaries.

The real line to draw about the casting is how well the actors inhabit their characters (Christ, I sound like James Lipton). Farrell is completely convincing as Arturo Bandini. He doesn’t ugly himself up for the role, just takes an unruly sweep of black hair, a skinny frame and, you know, acts. Which comes as a mild shock if you’ve seen many of his other movies. As a lost but ambitious writer, and as an inept, sometimes angry dreamer, he more than does the job.

Hayek rises — or descends — to the occasion of playing a mere mortal with equal skill. Cursed as she is with magnificent beauty, she still manages to overcome that handicap to play One of Us, humanizing immigrant mesera Camilla Lopez through her layered conflicts and insecurities.

Rounding out the small cast is Idina Menzel — last seen on Broadway, painted green for Wicked. Menzel plays the sort of character we expect in this down-and-out world. She might have come off as a freakish, alcoholic nympho but she and Towne reveal her character as a sad, lonely woman desperate to be rescued by Bandini.

The film follows the course of Arturo and Camilla’s inexplicably tempestuous relationship. Towne makes the viewer ache to enter his old Los Angeles — beautifully recreated in South Africa, of all places — the kind of place where you can believe a writer down to literally his last nickel will discover his voice, and a couple lost souls will place themselves, however briefly, on love’s map.

Sunset Boulevard — Another sad-sack writer takes on L.A. and a femme fatale.

Frankie & Johnny — If you think Salma Hayek is implausable as a low-grade waitress, wait until you see Michelle Pfeiffer trying to pass as unattractive.