[rating: 1/5]
Oh, I get it. It’s called “28 Hotel Rooms”, and each scene is filmed in a hotel room, and the two lovers never leave any single one of the hotel rooms. Isn’t that clever?
It could be, but not for this film. Writer and director Matt Ross’s first feature-length film falls short of any intellectual or emotional depth by confining his characters in the four walls of, yep, you guessed it: 28 different hotel rooms.
The movie documents the blossoming love affair of a novelist and newly-married accountant (played by Chris Messina and Marin Ireland, respectively, and whose characters remain nameless throughout), after their one-night stand in New York.
Each scene is preceded by a quick flash of what room number the two are in (think “500 Days of Summer”, only that was with number of days). But who cares what room number they’re in if it doesn’t add any insight? What’s the point?
With “500 Days of Summer,” telling the audience what day it was before each scene was absolutely crucial for the plot to make sense and move the story along. We needed those numbers to hold on to so that the changes in plot line wouldn’t seem jumpy and surprising.
Except in this movie, the numbers tell us nothing.
They don’t even give us a clue as to how much time has passed between each of their encounters. It’s not until Marin says she misses her daughter that we realize it’s been at least nine months since hotel room 516 (or whatever) because there she is, missing her newborn child and trying to extract some sympathy from the viewers. But there’s no sympathy here.
Instead, we’re left wondering why we didn’t get to see the pregnancy in the first place. And if it’s only been nine months, shouldn’t Marin have gained even the slightest bit of baby-weight? Shouldn’t she want to save her marriage for the sake of her new family? Is her husband bat-s*** crazy/evil or something? Is that the reason she keeps cheating on him with Messina, who just got married himself?
Wait a second—the guy just got married? When did that happen?
There’s no way of telling, because we never get to see anyone besides the two lovers. We don’t get to see them in their own world outside of the hotel rooms. Ross feeds us with dialogue to help fill in the gaps of plot and character development (Messina’s character tell us he and his wife recently moved to Portland, Maine, and Marin delivers a bunch of “I love you, but I love him too, but I really love you” lines). Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to make the story believable.
The dialogue tells us that things in the outside world have changed. But we never really see it for ourselves, so the movie doesn’t allow the audience to root for any of the characters. We don’t see their love as “meant to be,” we see them as two morons cheating on their spouses. And one of them even has a kid (who can talk now, by the way, according to room 1218, or something).
Then Messina and Marin finally declare some sort of change in their lifestyles. They say, to each other, “Chicago. Six months. We’ll be together.” That’s the only solid indication of time we get in the whole movie, and then it ends. But who cares by this point?
I wish I had kept count of the number of hotel rooms from the beginning, just so that when I got to the 27th one, I would’ve known that the movie was almost over.
