‘The Hottest State’ is numbingly cold
Published 10:11 pm Thursday, September 13, 2007
Well, maybe it was better on the page.
“The Hottest State” is an adaptation of actor Ethan Hawke’s 1997 novel, with Hawke writing and directing the film as well. It’s a youth romance, a look at the intensity and foolishness of dewy love.
William (Mark Webber) is a Texas-born actor getting his first movie jobs; Sara (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an aspiring singer. They meet, make out and go to Mexico together while he’s on a job. Then they come home to New York and complications ensue.
That’s really all there is to the movie, which spends its boring final third with William trying to convince Sara to get back together with him. I, on the other hand, was wishing everybody could just go their separate ways and get on with their lives, including me.
It is possible — maybe — that this conventional mismatched romance might have caught fire with two great actors in the leads, but Webber and Sandino Moreno (from “Maria Full of Grace”) lack focus. His style tends toward the slacker doofus, while she conveys an earnestness insufficient to explain her character.
Laura Linney has a few good moments as William’s no-nonsense mother, and Hawke himself gives the film’s best performance as William’s wandering father, whose absence is presumed to be the source of his son’s problems. Hawke actually captures a certain gravity that is beyond the younger actors.
But then again, I suppose they’re meant to be young and callow. The grisly business of standing in the street below a woman’s house, or leaving too many needy messages on a phone answering machine, are painful enough when you’re actually 21 years old and doing them. But it’s not pleasant to watch it in a movie.
The whole thing feels like a remembered anecdote of young love, which is important to the person telling the anecdote but not unusual or colorful enough to matter to the listener. Hawke hasn’t done what artists do, which is find the frame or the shape that would transform a universal feeling into storytelling. But maybe it was better on the page.
