AllMovie

Ethan Hawke's debut feature as a director, Chelsea Walls is an ambitious and well-cast film that bogs down in film school poeticizing and hipster posing. The film apparently takes place in a fantasy world where people in hotel hallways recite poetry in voice-over instead of speaking to each other. It's an okay place to visit, particularly when they're reading Dylan Thomas, but the poetry isn't always that good, and the dialogue that fills the spaces between it often seems to be straining for profundity. For example, Mark Webber (half of an emptily attractive but soulful-looking couple with Rosario Dawson) titles everything he writes "The Insufferable Hunger of the Damned." Why? "I don't know. It's the last thing people want to see." That's actually one of the more interesting exchanges in the film, because there's a reflexivity to it that suggests that Hawke and screenwriter Nicole Burdette recognize how their project's own pretension and solipsism might be taken. There's another scene in which Uma Thurman speaks on the phone, presumably to her husband (not coincidentally, Hawke in real life), who whines to her about a project he's working on: "My movie's horrible. No one likes it." These little flashes of painful self-awareness lighten up the morose atmosphere of the film. With a couple of exceptions (the redoubtable Steve Zahn among them), the characters are all so similar in how they express themselves that they all begin to run together, distinguishable only by their moodily lit faces. The virtually plotless, meandering film quickly gets tedious.