The Hottest State

Although I drive past the corner of Bedford Avenue and Broadway (the Brooklyn one) on a daily basis, I’ve yet to encounter two hipsters whose cultivated inauthenticity is quite as palpable and grating as Catalina Sandino Moreno and Mark Webber’s personas in Ethan Hawke’s overlong and indulgent adaptation of his own source material, The Hottest State. Ethan is the bard of young love yet again, but Before Sunset this is not. Despite the participation of an ex “Dawson’s Creek” star, the film remains watchable largely because of Chris Norr’s moist, hyper-saturated camerawork and some moments that verge on emotional resonance. Sadly, most of these moments get drowned by Jesse Harris’s overripe soundtrack of tunes performed by an all-star lineup of indie crooners (Cat Power, M Ward, Colin Oberst).

Webber plays a young actor on the verge of success who falls for a Hispanic songstress (Moreno) whom he meets in a bar one night while out with his ex (Michelle Williams). He walks her home and discovers that she’s squatting across the street. She tells him not to smoke because she’s thinking about kissing him, and, pow, they’re between the sheets and painting her new apartment blue. They take a trip to Mexico for more loving, but break-ups and early- twenties angst lie around the corner.

The central romance works well enough, and Webber is really convincing when he’s hanging out by a telephone, post break-up #1, tormented by the prospect of calling her. He’s even better when he’s complaining to his mother about his cluelessness concerning his masculinity. Yet, what’s really with this guy? He exhibits the traits of a flaky, self-involved, struggling Brooklyn artist, but the studied soullessness is replaced by an earnestness this humble viewer didn’t quite buy. Catalina fares a bit better, but she’s not the focus of the narrative and she seems a little too serene and accessible for a beautiful girl in those sultry red coats and purple knit caps, especially when she constantly claims to have come to the city not to have a boyfriend.

And why all the back story? Mom (Laura Linney, doing her best to make the best of a bad situation) relocated with the boy to New Jersey and settled into a life of working-class mediocrity as a college-textbook saleswoman, while dating the real-life director’s best friend (Frank Whaley), whose scenes most have been cut from this already way-too-long endeavor. Is it really necessary for Mr. Hawke to pop in and out of flashbacks as our hero’s father, a Texas cowboy who has remarried and settled on home soil? He’s a mere ten years older than Webber, who could probably pass for thirty if he wanted to. It's not quite as jarring as the minute age difference between Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, but the comparisons is silly; Frankenheimer was always in control of his material, whereas Mr. Hawke can’t seem to see the forest for the trees.

                                                       Brandon Harris