Dir. Gary Yates, Canada, 2005, 89 mins
Cast: Craig Ferguson, Anna Friel, Kevin Pollak
This is an ensemble piece about a group of people gathered in the motel of the title, who are all at one of the most romantic honeymoon spots in the world for very different, unromantic reasons. Based on the six interlinked short plays which make up Canadian writer George F. Walker's cult theatre success "Suburban Motel", Walker and co-writer Dani Romain have woven three of them into an effectively coherent screenplay.
All the characters are at some sort of crisis point in their lives. Loretta (Caroline Dhavernas), the waitress in the motel's diner, is pregnant by a man she doesn't want to marry, has a loser of a boyfriend and is being pursued by a small time hustler (Pollak), who is trying to persuade her to star in a porn movie. Peter Keleghan and Wendy Crewson play a middle class couple whose marriage is collapsing. He's lost his job and can't find another; she's tempted to try turning a trick or two after befriending a hooker, who operates from the motel. Then there is Denise, a recovering drug addict, reunited with her ex-convict husband, who is trying to get her baby back from social services. Friel is both touching and funny as the flaky but sympathetic Denise, who manages to alienate her uptight social worker (Janet Laine Green) in a particularly surreal way. Linking all these stories are the Serbian immigrant owners of the hotel, the bullying Boris (Damir Andrei) and his kind hearted daughter Sophie (Catherine Fitch), who does her best to solve everyone's problems, and the janitor Fitch. Scottish comedian/actor Craig Ferguson is particularly good as this gloomy, spaced out character with a sad secret which is destroying him.
The film, directed by Gary Yates, is engrossing throughout, and keeps all its different stories, themes and moods, which range from farce to tragedy, in perfect balance. The characters are interesting and well drawn with an individuality and originality, which mark it out as peculiarly Canadian in its sensibility, particularly in the irresolution of its conclusion.
Carol Allen
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