Chelsea Walls | Film Review

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Chelsea Walls **

by Ed Gonzalez on April 11, 2002 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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Ethan Hawke has always fancied himself the bastard child of the Beatnik generation and it's all over his feature-length directorial debut Chelsea Walls. I've seen the walls of the Chelsea Hotel. The pained artwork of its tenants (past and present) covers those walls. And if those walls could talk they'd probably sound something like this. Whether you'll want to listen is an entirely different matter. Since Hawke readily admits that watching Chelsea Walls is not unlike eating shit (or watching "the insufferable hunger of the damned"), let us call a spade a spade. Chelsea Walks is equal parts obnoxious, meandering and, well, insufferable. Shot on what looks like the video left over from Richard Linklater's Tape, the film purports to celebrate the bohemian air that flows through the Chelsea Hotel. Hawke's direction is quaint and ethereal though Nicole Burdette's screenplay is less concerned with engaging the spirits of the past than it is with, well, blowing hot air. A young black kid's love for Langston Hughes is the only suggestion that the bohemia of New York's past (the Harlem Renaissance, the Chelsea Hotel, Warhol's Factory) has carried on. No one here, save jazzman Jimmy Scott, is anywhere near as interesting as past Hotel residents Sarah Bernhardt, William S. Burroughs, Sid Vicious or, hell, even Bob Dylan. For having the least diarrhea of the mouth, Robert Sean Leonard's tortured musician becomes, by default, the film's haunting center. His phone conversation with a former lover suggests a man running from love to a place of false illusions. But with single rooms at the hotel now ranging from $135 to $250 a night, it's a shame that the only people who could ever afford to stay there are the actors playing the film's tortured-artists-without-jobs.

Director(s): Ethan Hawke
Screenplay: Nicole Burdette
Cast: Rosario Dawson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Sean Leonard, Natasha Richardon, Jimmy Scott, Uma Thurman, Mark Webber, Tuesday Weld, Kevin Corrigan, Frank Whaley, Paz de la Huerta, Steven Zahn
Distributor: Lions Gate Films
Runtime: 109 min.
Rating: R
Year: 2002