Chelsea Walls | Review

Directorial debut falls flat.

It’s the people that make places famous and at one time the Chelsea Hotel was one of those places, a place where renowned writers, painters, singers bounced ideas and their inspiration off the walls of this popular shelter. In Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls we discover that even if the place has lost much of its former glory, it is still the place that houses many dreams of struggling artists. Shacked up in this hotel are people from all walks of life, some are wasted youths, some are the ones without the lucky break and some are the wanna-be hopefuls all with the hope of attaining artistic success. Using the camera as the eyes and ears of the walls, we the viewer take a peek at those who live their days within the quarters of this building.

Chelsea Walls is a rather dull and uneventful film. The acting coming from an ensemble cast of familiar faces is rather sub-par. These dreadfully boring characters make it a little hard for the viewer to care and the drivel that comes out of each scene makes it a challenge to stay the least bit interested. I think that Hawke called in some favours from his acting buddies including his main squeeze Uma Thurman (Pulp Fiction) rather than concentrate on making the characters and their plights appealing. In theory, Hawke’s intention is to present us this conglomerate of personalities, each with that artist’s desire and quest to gain some sort of notoriety, but instead, we are handed a bunch of snip-its of stories that really don’t say much about “that struggle” or those that suffer for their art. Hawke puts together the notion of the common struggle, but the film does very little to make us interested in their individual stories with the exception of Bud played by Kris Kristofferson (Lone Star), it seems as if this somewhat mysterious writer would have many stories to tell to his two lady friends and possibly the viewer, but unpredictably, we are left out in the cold just like the hotel going through a change in season.

All these vignettes are filmed without any of the visual flair you’d see in a movie that he acted in, confined mostly to the small spaces, Hawke uses a soft and dim tone when lighting each scene and the use of digital video appropriately gives the characters the raw/unglamorous look that one can relate to the life of an artist. Unfortunately, there is nothing in this film that came close to raising my level of interest and therefore my suggestion would be to pass on this one.

Rating 1 stars