>>REVIEW
At the Hotel
Wednesdays at 9 p.m.
CBC
It’s definitely an ambitious undertaking in Canadian television – the recently debuted six-part series At the Hotel features more than 100 speaking parts and is an unconventional blend of drama, comedy, mystery, satire and music.
Set in the fictional Château Rousseau, At the Hotel is the brainchild of Ken Finkleman, notable to many as the driving force and star of the award-winning comedy satire series The Newsroom.
As At the Hotel’s director, executive producer and primary writer, there’s no denying that Finkleman has set out to create something very special. The entire series was shot on 35 millimetre film and presented in a widescreen format to give it a lavish, theatrical look. Many of the interiors of the art-deco Château Rousseau were built in a west-end Toronto studio and are convincingly beautiful and ornate representations of the finest historical hotels to be found anywhere in this country.
A finely crafted score uses opera and other classical music to lend an air of elegance to many scenes. Also, kudos to the nicely rendered flashback opening scenes, dealing with the untimely death of a chambermaid in the hotel pool, back in 1961. With the first two episodes as evidence, it seems that each subsequent instalment of Hotel will reveal more of the events that led up to this young woman’s mysterious demise.
With many dollars and literally hundreds of skilled people involved in bringing us Hotel, a painfully obvious question comes to mind: couldn’t they have taken all these resources and put something together that has some sort of entertainment value?
At the Hotel is a plodding, uninteresting exercise in pretension. Scene after scene features contrived dialogue being exchanged by arguably the largest collection of unlikable characters ever presented on the small screen.
Finkleman and his scribes have populated their fictional inn almost exclusively with drunks, thieves and other self-serving assholes that are instantly tiresome in their predictable inability to take the high road in any situation.
Take for example the red-jacketed bellman, Jeremy (Brendan McGibbon), and his chambermaid girlfriend, Candace (Robin Brule). He’s a compulsive gambler who steals frocks out of the luggage of guests for his lady love. She’s a rough talking gal who romps in her undies with wealthy married male guests as part of her and Jeremy’s thriving blackmail enterprise.
The romantic ups and downs of this obnoxious pair are presented primarily through flashy musical numbers where she sings a bit, he sings for awhile, then they sing together via split-screen.
Sure these numbers add some variety to the show and jar one awake from the usual snail-paced gloom of the series, but they fail to make me care one lick about a goofy lowlife bellhop and his selfish, small-minded lover.
While there are some nice performances in Hotel – Canadian actor Maury Chaykin (Whale Music, The Sweet Hereafter) does a nice job as a washed-up drunken comedian in episode 2 – the overall effort fails to amuse. It’s unfortunate that the writers spent so much time dreaming up nasty dialogue for their many unlikable characters that they forgot to give us even one person to root for in their fictional world of perpetual depravity. |
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