CHELSEA WALLS (Ethan Hawke, 2002)

Reviewed: April 16th, 2002

I lasted 25 minutes. And considering I waited online for an hour prior to showtime, no one can accuse me of not wanting to see this film from the start. Of not wanting to like it.

I am furious. Furious that my time has been wasted in such a grotesque way.

I rarely walk out of films. The last one I remember walking out of was The Patriot, almost two years ago. But you know, it's true: life is short. We only get a limited number of two hours.

Chelsea Walls -- Ethan Hawke's directorial debut -- has one of the worst opening 25 minutes I've seen in a feature film. To say it is completely unwatchable would be an understatement. Because it is not something to be watched, it is something to be endured. Lion's Gate's marketing department should print up a bunch of those amusement park T-shirts. These will say: "I Survived Chelsea Walls."

And I'm proud of the fact I won't be getting one.

Call me weak, but I simply could not handle digital images that look like a third-generation VHS copy, unspooled, tangled up, dumped in horseshit and then transferred to film (see The Anniversary Party as proof that low-budget digital can look good).
I could not handle an awful sound mix, horrifically muddled cause of Hawke's insistence to play wall-to-wall melodramatic elevator muzak. I could not handle seeing some of the best actors in film today just barely coming off as more talented than Carrot Top. Names like Steve Zahn, Uma Thurman, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Sean Leonard, Vincent D'Onofrio might as well be names like Corey Haim and Cindy Crawford here. I could not handle a film that moves at such a sickeningly leaden and sluggish pace that the opening credits don't finish rolling until the 17 minute mark. I could not handle awful, completely pointless slow motion shots that felt like Hawke was just toying with the settings of his new digital camera. I could not handle editing that's so disjointed it never makes a bit of sense. We're with two characters for three seconds then onto the next two before we even had any sense of our bearing in the previous scene (let alone any bearing of the characters themselves). I could not handle scenes pointlessly intercut with each other so that any sense of time is jumbled and all reasoning is lost. I could not handle dialogue so trite and so bland, that everytime someone spoke it literally made me cringe.

Everything about this film reeks of pretension... every other scene is permeated by some lame-ass, cockeyed idea to pay tribute to all the wonderful artists who use to live in the Chelsea Hotel, people like Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan and Sid Vicious. But instead all of Hawke's techniques and choices just come off as pathetic attempts to mimic the "freedom" and "eccentricities" of such great men. It doesn't work. Nothing about this film does.

Hawke thinks of Chelsea Walls as "more of a double album, than a film." Yeah, great... so that's his cute way of saying instead of being concerned with standard film issues like character and plot and pacing and editing and acting... everything should just wash over you, man. Just embrace the flow, man. Just live in the moments, brother.

Fuck that. Yes, there are filmmakers that know how to make films that work as music does, some of the greatest of all time, names like Kubrick and Lynch. Hawke, on the other hand, has no idea what he's doing behind a camera. He has no idea how to make a double album film. Chelsea Walls does not work as music because everything about it is so poorly conceived and executed that you can never even hope to allow the film to envelop you. You never have the chance to surrender to its (nonexistent) power like you do to a Kubrick or a Lynch. You're just put-off and utterly disgusted.

Ethan Hawke is a comically untalented director. I hope he never makes another movie and remains in front of the camera where he belongs. Stay as far away from Chelsea Walls as possible.

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