The Motel

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Michael Kang's lovely independent film The Motel is set in, yes, a motel run by a Chinese American family, but it's not a family film per se - it doesn't at all shy away from the seedy aspects of this place, with its hourly rates (and weekly rates - both with their own depressing qualities) nor from its protagonist's budding sexual curiosity.

The motel manager is a gruff woman who carries a baseball bat to bust her own place's doors down when a customer is late with hourly payment and slaps her son for the smallest transgression. She has two kids who help her out and the eldest, 13 year old son Ernest (Jeffrey Chyau, who would be right at home in an episode of Freaks and Geeks), is a pudgy bespectacled introvert - some might say, nerd - who longs for Christine, the girl who works as a waitress across the street, but is stuck scrubbing toilets for his hard-to-please mother.

The girl Christine (a very appealing Samantha Futerman) is perhaps the most assured character in the batch. Christine's also Ernest's only real supporter, having pushed him into entering a writing contest; he wins honorary mention, which his mother disparages. Ernest finds a new role model in Sam (Sung Kang), the cool stud who comes into the motel with a doll or moll or, well, a blonde we never get a clear look at. His increasing, and futile, attempts to "woo" her based on advice from Sam form the basic spine of the story.

The family scenes are not all that different from what we've seen before and the mother character is almost so unlikable she's hard to bear, verging on the one-dimensional. Oddly the grandfather doesn't appear until 1/3 into the film, even though he seems important to the family dynamic. But the sincerity and lack of pretension in The Motel and its gentleness set it a notch above the usual indie coming of age story. There are scenes full of deadpan humor, silent comedy even - such as the scene where a local white-trashy bully and his picked-on sister follow ernest as he does he tasks - nothing happens, other than a train of menace as they follow him through the motel.

At first, Sung Kang's Sam (like the director, Korean American) is a little hard to figure - he's a womanizer, he's cool, then he's a mentor to Ernest, then he's lonely - but it slowly reveals more about what - or who - he's pining for, why he's filling his empty days with one day stands. He teaches Ernest scream therapy, how to drive, how to make a woman wild (that last one doesn't work out so well), encourages him to be less repressed ("Don't ever let anyone tell you porn is bad.")

The Motel is based on the novel Waylaid by Ed Lin, and there's really not much in Kang's script in the way of high drama, it's a gentle character comedy full of nicely offhanded moments. It's quite short, too, but perfect length for its scale, all the way up to heartfelt finale, also appropriately quiet.