The Hottest State.

"Unsurprisingly for a film written and directed by Ethan Hawke that's also based on his vaguely autobiographical 1997 novel, The Hottest State is thoroughly infused with its creator's pretentious indie-bohemian persona," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"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 couple in Ethan Hawke's overlong and mildly indulgent adaptation of his own source material," writes Brandon Harris.

Updated through 8/27.

But for Aaron Hillis, writing in the Voice, "Hawke quite capably taps into the bittersweet complexities of young, love-struck idiocy." Sure, "It's achingly sincere, which isn't to say that Hawke's Tennessee Williams–quoting, overwrought script isn't as purple as Prince's rain and littered with dramatic shortcuts... Give the guy some credit, though: When you hit rock bottom with your first feature, the only way to go is up."

Updates, 8/23: "Like Julie Delpy, Hawke's costar in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (whose current release 2 Days in Paris also tracks a troubled couple), Hawke has examined the semi-cynical take on long-term relationships put forth in the aforementioned Richard Linklater-directed yarns and transplanted it into an unhappier situation," notes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The ongoing intimate blabber eventually gets tiring - once we see it coming there's nothing left to happen except the inevitable argument and acceptance - but State remains perceptive."

Online listening tip. Hawke's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Michelle Orange at the Reeler: "It's difficult to determine how much of the erratic behavior on display in The Hottest State... is meant to be attributed to love, and how much to being 21, but at a certain point irritation (or hindsight) takes over and it hardly matters."

Updates, 8/24: "Hawke knows where his own strengths lie," argues Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "This is tender, fragile stuff, and it does flirt with overt solipsism, yet Hawke, who also does some nice supporting work as William's gravelly-voiced absentee father, pulls it off. The storytelling isn't necessarily fluid, but each scene moves ahead with the force of its characters' desires, confusions and yearnings."

"Nearly two hours long, with a tenuous narrative continuity, The Hottest State, whose title refers both to passion and to Texas, is far more coherent than Mr Hawke's 2001 directorial debut, Chelsea Walls," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "At around the halfway point, however, its characters' haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil."

"As a director, Hawke has a tendency to gild the lily until it's hard and heavy as a bludgeon," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "But as William's feckless dad, who remarried and all but forgot about his unmoored son, he is quite touching."

Update, 8/25: ST VanAirsdale talks with Webber at the Reeler.

Updates, 8/27: "The Hottest State is one of the most inauthentic films I've seen in a long time," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

Catalina Sandino Moreno "has near top billing in two major upcoming productions: Mike Newell's adaptation of the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera and Soderbergh's Guerilla," notes Marcy Dermansky. "For now, however, it's a simple pleasure to watch her face in Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State... It's one hundred percent understandable why young William falls hard for Sarah.... It's when the two fall out of love that the tedium takes hold."

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2007 1:19 PM