James Y. Lee
The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel is a potent example of exactly the kind of documentary film I hold in high regard; the kind in which a documentary subject’s life changes significantly as a result of both the film’s existence and production. Its start as a film was relatively simple; Los Angeles is home to the Holloway Motel, a longtime lodging facility that, in early 2023, was sold to the city for renovations into a temporary shelter for the unhoused. The motel has only one permanent resident, who is simultaneously its manager; Tony Powell, who Holloway‘s directors, Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman, spotted on nearly a daily basis on the motel’s balcony drinking a glass of wine. Seeking a ripe opportunity to use the motel as part of a story about the city’s homelessness crisis, the two directors reached out to Powell for contact as he was getting ready to leave the motel for good… only to realize that the man they’d be talking to held much more of a significant story than either of them could have reckoned.
Powell is not just any man working for a motel service; decades earlier, he was formerly a major soccer star, one of the defenders for British football team Norwich City Football Club, who had a significant reputation for tough play and roughhousing on the field, and was widely hailed as one of the team’s strongest players. And yet, towards the late 1970s, he suddenly disappeared from both public and private view. He immediately estranged himself from the rest of his family; his wife and two daughters have since lost contact with him; his team members have since been unable to rediscover his whereabouts. That disappearance alone is an interesting story itself, and finding the man behind it after his complete vanishing from the public eye is enough of a triumph for any documentarian to capitalize on.
But it’s evident that Petros and Freeman’s ambitions didn’t stop there. Powell’s eviction from the motel itself is a massive change in pace for his life; one that retools the place he needs to live, what he does for a living, and what kind of life he’s going to adjust to. And the filmmakers aren’t willing to simply shy away from potential further investigation; they probe at Powell with questions about the ways his family reacted to his disappearance and estrangement, as well as the pivotal incident that led him to disappear in the first place. And while the film’s construction is ultimately contingent on how much of his life he’s willing to disclose, the details Powell does reveal are wildly informative of the kind of culture he comes from, and eventually, the future he wants to chart out for himself.
For one, Tony Powell is a gay man—and his fraught reckoning with even the idea of coming out was a significant source of internal conflict and fear. Unable to face the shame of rejection and the potential of destroying his name in a largely homophobic culture, his disappearance was an attempt for him to mitigate as much as damage as possible. But in the process, he destroyed his relationship with his wife and two daughters by vanishing from the scope of their lives; and years later, his lover, David, passed away from complications with AIDS in the heat of the epidemic. It’s hard not to see why such significant upheavals led him to such a reclusive life, but at the same time, those events fail to leave him blameless for the people affected by his sudden disappearance.
What makes this film stand out in particular, however, is how willing its directors are to challenge Powell on that notion, who fully recognize that the place he finds himself in now is one where he needs to be forced to change. They build up a meaningful personal relationship with Powell while still probing at his past with confrontational questions; an interaction that seems to influence his approach to how he chooses to live out the rest of his life. His age is leading to health complications, and the times are shifting culturally to a degree where queerness is more generally acceptable; he has only so much time left to embrace who he is, but he still has time left to reconnect and seek forgiveness. From there, the most moving stretch of the film proceeds to unfold; where, through a series of strikingly potent encounters with people who were once in his life, a man who once believed his time was completely up realizes that it’s never too late to come back home.
Even on a formal level, The Last Guest is sharp enough not to limit itself completely to the tried-and-true method of using talking-head interviews. Deftly edited montages in the style of most archival sports documentaries make clear the impact that Powell left on Norwich and the general British soccer scene; and they also serve to make incredibly stark the contrast between the persona that he created in his soccer career, and the complexly guarded yet surprisingly vulnerable person he wound up becoming during his self-imposed exile from the public eye. Simultaneously playing off of and contrasting those sports documentary tropes is also the consistent use of present-day on-the-ground footage as Powell goes through multiple personal episodes; ones of significant revelation and deeply fraught troubles, which give us a much more confrontational and movingly personal insight into who he is as an aging gay man confronting his identity and his legacy. It’s the right combination of filmmaking tools that allows us as much of a genuine glimpse as we can get into this deeply transformative and redemptive stretch in the life of this incredibly specific man.
At once an example of queer cinema’s ability to document the shifts in queer culture and its effects on individuals, as well as a potently assembled capsule within the life of someone whose fear of leaving the closet sealed him off from those around him, The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel provides an angle that most films like it haven’t provided in the past. It’s not the recounting of a traditionally exceptional life, taking the story of someone who left a massive impact on a particular arena and then moving through its motions for all to see. Rather, it’s the story of someone who could have led a seemingly exceptional life and chose not to—and then finds something else exceptional in the life he chooses to live from this point onward by seeking forgiveness and moving past his regrets. The end result is a potent reminder that it’s never too late to change things the way they are… and an incredible portrait of a man whose tale of resilience could very well resonate with those dwelling on missed opportunities and paths not taken.
