In my experience, pitching anything as “coming of age” story is instant death. Somehow, it reeks of overly familiar stuff that everybody is supposed to have moved past long ago. Bildungsroman has a slightly better ring to it, especially if you can hyphenate it somehow, but the idea is the same: teenagers learning about responsibility and identity and love and sex and death–ugh, right? Well, no. As Frederick Barthelme once told me, semi-cryptically: “It’s a rug.” Categorizing something doesn’t fully describe it yet, and it certainly doesn’t imply a value judgment. Most stories owe a huge debt to the major arcana and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but that doesn’t make them bad rugs, dig?
What I’m trying to say is this: The Motel, written and directed by Michael Kang (not that Michael Kang) and based on the novel Waylaid by Ed Lin, is a thoroughly winning and funny coming-of-age story, and that shouldn’t scare you away. Thirteen-year-old Chinese-American Ernest (Jeffrey Chyau) is growing up fast, helping his stern mother run a seedy hourly motel in what looks like somewhere, New Jersey. Hookers and tricks cum and go, leaving behind porno magazines and unpaid credit card bills. Ernest meets his only friend at the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant, deals with racism, the local bully, and his obnoxious little sister, and enters writing contests in hopes of leaving the motel behind for good. Yes, the individual stages of Ernest’s story are familiar, but it’s their specificity that makes them fresh. It’s been a while that I’ve seen a movie that feels so much like what an independent film is supposed to be: unassuming, sharply written, poignant, and surprisingly unique.
The Motel. Michael Kang, 2005. ****
- The Motel Official Site
- List of cities where The Motel is currently showing
- The Motel trailer on YouTube
- The Motel on Rotten Tomatoes
[tags]film, independent, michael kang, motel life, 4 stars, coming of age[/tags]
[...] It’s a tough life in the neighborhood, and I ought to know: Dito Montiel’s coming-of-age drama (there’s that phrase again) about getting the hell out of Queens and coming back all grown up is set right here in Astoria. Recognizing the streets beneath the rumbling N train, the Greek restaurants and garishly lit corner delis kept me entertained for a while, but–from what I can tell–Astorians these days don’t have quite as much bad sex in stairwells and fewer baseball bat fights over graffiti than Dito and his buddies. The scenes between Young Dito (Shia LaBeouf) and his girlfriend Laurie (Melonie Diaz) are sweet, but their grown-up counterparts Robert Downey Jr. and Rosario Dawson don’t have a whole lot to do. As Dito’s parents, Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest get an overripe “Daddy never loved me” storyline, and in the end, everything’s wrapped up much too neatly. If you only have time for one low-income NYC neighborhood drama, make it Raising Victor Vargas. [...]