Swept Away by Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust

Any movie that can make Jeffrey Wells sound like an 18-year-old James Agee is a movie I need to see as soon as possible.

Swept Away
Photo: Paramount Vantage

If my personal moviegoing history has taught me anything, it’s that you shouldn’t get unduly excited over an advance rave, because when you finally do get to judge for yourself, you will probably be disappointed. That said, Jeffrey Wells’s overwhelmed response to Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, automatically pushes the film to number one on my list of Movies I Can’t Wait to See.

“It took me a few hours to come to this,” Wells writes, “but Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, which I saw last night at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre, is about how self-acceptance—who you really are, where you come from, what you’re feeling deep down—brings clarity, and with that the noblest kind of strength, which is the ability to love…

“It took me most of last night and a couple of hours this morning to come to terms with this movie and what it actually is and how I feel about it, but I guess anything of value takes a while to attain.”

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Any movie that can make Wells sound like an 18-year-old James Agee is a movie I need to see as soon as possible.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the founder and original editor of The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, he is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com and TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com.

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