If you want to pick through it, you could find things to praise in “The Motel Life,” an adaptation of the novel by Willy Vlautin. Emile Hirsch is wonderfully expressive even in his stillness, and it’s nice to see Stephen Dorff in a change of pace role as a hapless and frightened loser. Dakota Fanning is growing into a graceful adult actress.
And so we end up looking forward to what they might do next — if only as a way to pass the time as we sit through this sluggish exercise.
As good as “The Motel Life” is for the actors, that’s how bad it is for the viewer. As two little boys, Frank (Hirsch) and Jerry Lee (Dorff) faced the world together, and now, as young men, Frank’s lot in life is to keep Jerry Lee out of trouble. In the movie’s first minutes, Jerry Lee is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and so Frank jumps up and drives him out of town.
You may have seen movies like this. They tend all to have the same soundtrack, which consists of an acoustic guitar mournfully sounding through an echo chamber, alternating with an electric keyboard, also in an echo chamber, playing long chords that serve as an undertone. The effect is distancing, as if to say that whatever you’re seeing isn’t necessarily important in itself but emblematic of the human condition.
Set in 1990 for no particular reason (no one in the movie could afford a cellphone, anyway), “The Motel Life” depicts a world of scruffiness and squalor
There are two scenes, however, to lift from the rubble. In one the police come to interrogate Jerry Lee about the hit-and-run. The other scene involves Kris Kristofferson as a wise man who tells Frank, “Don’t make decisions thinking you’re a lowlife. Make decisions thinking you’re a great man.”
Even a subpar movie has occasionally nuggets of wisdom.
