Hot Summer Nights (2017)
(On Cable TV, August 2021) Anyone hearing “coming of age film starring Timothée Chalamet” may be forgiven for recoiling in dread of another snoozefest along the lines of Call Me by Your Name, but it turns out that Hot Summer Nights is quite different. Also quite incoherent, which begins early on, as the film shows us our protagonist being sent to live for the summer of 1991 with his aunt in Cape Cod, MA. Neither townie nor part of the rich hordes descending upon their summer houses, our protagonist soon hooks up with a local drug-dealing celebrity hoodlum, and somehow gets close to the local dream-girl. That nagging voice you’re hearing is not so much the sound of multiple clichés crashing into each other (namely: coming of age meeting drug kingpin tragedy) than a narrator who has no business being in the movie. While our narrator is the link between the film’s fast-paced opening and the film’s epilogue (especially considering that nearly everyone described by the narrator ends up dead a few years later, portending nothing good about our lead characters), he also immediately and ultimately blurs the film’s narrative viewpoint — are we following the adventures of an aimless young man sent to Cape Cod for the summer, or are we following those of this outsider coming to town and becoming a legend to the locals? When the narrator gravely intones, at the end, that “we never saw [the protagonist] again,” you just want to slap him behind the ears and say HE WENT BACK HOME, YOU SMALL-TOWN YOKEL. But such fuzziness is endemic to Hot Summer Nights — our lead character is both a young troubled man and someone who picks up the local weed trade in a matter of days. He’s a shy outsider who somehow gets the attention of the local hottie. He’s coming of age, but also starring in a teenage version of all drug kingpin movies ending with the inevitable consequences of organized crime. The coming-of-age thing doesn’t work when they’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs on a weekly basis. The criminal narrative is squarely stolen from Scorsese and al, barely scaled down to fit in Cape Cod. The third act is an overly familiar blend of personal tragedies, climaxing just as a hurricane makes it to the town, destroying everything as everyone kill each other. The period soundtrack is similarly used as blunt instrument. If none of this sounds subtle, you have no idea — even the film’s hyperactive opening (in which local legends are discussed) seems poorly imitative of better movies. It does end up with a mildly crowd-pleasing film (well, as long as you have the capacity to cheer for juvenile drug dealers), but it’s a film that dies the moment it stops moving, because that’s when the questions emerge, and the longer you question Hot Summer Nights the faster it falls apart. I did like it better than Call Me by Your Name, but I’m not fooling myself: this is really far from being as good as the other coming-of-aged film featuring Timothée Chalamet.
