The Hottest State
Directed by Ethan Hawke
Dedication
Directed by Justin Theroux
Love is art’s favorite—and most abused—abstraction. At the movies, we’ve witnessed the blossoming of love between every shade of character: dimwitted idealists and depraved tormenters, blithe stargazers and indolent radicals. Opposites attract, or seem to attract, with the results of their delicate mating games predicated entirely on the success or failure of orchestrated chemistry. The love story usually fares well in the hands of an actor-director (such as Rob Reiner or early Woody Allen) or an actor’s director (Preston Sturges or Mike Nichols), but not necessarily those of an actor directing.
Deciphering the timeless ritual behind coupling requires an outside observer (i.e. the filmmaker) to evaluate the rhythms of dialogue and movement for their plausibility. In Dedication, talented performer Justin Theroux makes his directorial debut with plenty of attention to the stylizing of romantic frustration, but shows weaker aptitude for conveying individualized exchanges. It appears that the third eye went blind when the actors needed it.
Theroux gives an airtight scenario of sitcom proportions, following loquacious children’s book writer Henry (Billy Crudup) as he’s forced to collaborate with discouragingly green illustrator Lucy (Mandy Moore) after losing his sage-like colleague Rudy (Tom Wilkinson) to cancer. The amusing retorts that Henry shared with his late collaborator apparently fueled his work, and in death he won’t let them part. Rudy lingers in the author’s mind as a figure of reason, commenting on his ambivalence about starting a new project. “If you keep hanging around with you, you’re going to want to kill yourself,” the Rudy specter observes, and Henry finally listens. But attempting to make a new book with Lucy, he grows more interested in making love.
It’s here that the seams of Dedication start to come apart. Replacing his passion for writing with a hopelessly juvenile romantic wild goose chase, Henry makes a decision that alters the movie’s initially engaging trajectory. Crudup delivers his lines with a mixture of comic timing and heartbroken ennui, but there’s little about Henry’s despondent persona to suggest that Lucy could regard him as attractive. He’s an ignoble character incapable of helping others or himself; the script provides little beyond Crudup’s sad eyes to sympathize with. The unsatisfying irony of Dedication is that its lead personality has none.
A similar flaw haunts the earnest protagonists of The Hottest State, although some attempt is made to tackle the problem.
Directed by Ethan Hawke from his own novel, State tells a colorfully expressionistic story of 20-year-old dreamer William (Mark Webber) and his brief fling with sexy songwriter Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Wordy and conventional, the script never strays far from the familiar. William struggles with the anguish of having an estranged dad (Hawke, straining credibility considering his age) and the fear that he’s headed on a comparable path to the death of passion. He believes, for a fleeting moment, that Sarah represents an exit from despair. Not one to be objectified, she only plays along until the game gets old.
Well sustained by Webber and Moreno, State is basically a series of exchanges that continually expand to greater levels of intensity. Gorgeously shot to reflect William’s gyrating emotional flow, it toys with the concept of monogamy and rejects it, allowing the union of William and Sarah to become undone by excessive self-awareness. The pivotal scene finds the lovers playfully enacting an imagined downfall and creepily foreshadowing its expected realization. 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. 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. Having written the source material, Hawke had veto power of his characters’ individual quirks before he put them in front of a camera. Perhaps it’s this degree of control that keeps the temperature in State just right.
Directed by Ethan Hawke
Dedication
Directed by Justin Theroux
Love is art’s favorite—and most abused—abstraction. At the movies, we’ve witnessed the blossoming of love between every shade of character: dimwitted idealists and depraved tormenters, blithe stargazers and indolent radicals. Opposites attract, or seem to attract, with the results of their delicate mating games predicated entirely on the success or failure of orchestrated chemistry. The love story usually fares well in the hands of an actor-director (such as Rob Reiner or early Woody Allen) or an actor’s director (Preston Sturges or Mike Nichols), but not necessarily those of an actor directing.
Deciphering the timeless ritual behind coupling requires an outside observer (i.e. the filmmaker) to evaluate the rhythms of dialogue and movement for their plausibility. In Dedication, talented performer Justin Theroux makes his directorial debut with plenty of attention to the stylizing of romantic frustration, but shows weaker aptitude for conveying individualized exchanges. It appears that the third eye went blind when the actors needed it.
Theroux gives an airtight scenario of sitcom proportions, following loquacious children’s book writer Henry (Billy Crudup) as he’s forced to collaborate with discouragingly green illustrator Lucy (Mandy Moore) after losing his sage-like colleague Rudy (Tom Wilkinson) to cancer. The amusing retorts that Henry shared with his late collaborator apparently fueled his work, and in death he won’t let them part. Rudy lingers in the author’s mind as a figure of reason, commenting on his ambivalence about starting a new project. “If you keep hanging around with you, you’re going to want to kill yourself,” the Rudy specter observes, and Henry finally listens. But attempting to make a new book with Lucy, he grows more interested in making love.
It’s here that the seams of Dedication start to come apart. Replacing his passion for writing with a hopelessly juvenile romantic wild goose chase, Henry makes a decision that alters the movie’s initially engaging trajectory. Crudup delivers his lines with a mixture of comic timing and heartbroken ennui, but there’s little about Henry’s despondent persona to suggest that Lucy could regard him as attractive. He’s an ignoble character incapable of helping others or himself; the script provides little beyond Crudup’s sad eyes to sympathize with. The unsatisfying irony of Dedication is that its lead personality has none.
A similar flaw haunts the earnest protagonists of The Hottest State, although some attempt is made to tackle the problem.
Directed by Ethan Hawke from his own novel, State tells a colorfully expressionistic story of 20-year-old dreamer William (Mark Webber) and his brief fling with sexy songwriter Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Wordy and conventional, the script never strays far from the familiar. William struggles with the anguish of having an estranged dad (Hawke, straining credibility considering his age) and the fear that he’s headed on a comparable path to the death of passion. He believes, for a fleeting moment, that Sarah represents an exit from despair. Not one to be objectified, she only plays along until the game gets old.
Well sustained by Webber and Moreno, State is basically a series of exchanges that continually expand to greater levels of intensity. Gorgeously shot to reflect William’s gyrating emotional flow, it toys with the concept of monogamy and rejects it, allowing the union of William and Sarah to become undone by excessive self-awareness. The pivotal scene finds the lovers playfully enacting an imagined downfall and creepily foreshadowing its expected realization. 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. 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. Having written the source material, Hawke had veto power of his characters’ individual quirks before he put them in front of a camera. Perhaps it’s this degree of control that keeps the temperature in State just right.
