21 Grams|Leisure Lodge, Grants — The motel room at the end of the road

The film's three lives finally collide in a motel room in the New Mexico desert, hundreds of miles from Memphis, in a town nobody in the story chose. That motel is the Leisure Lodge, at 1204 East Santa Fe Avenue in Grants, and it is still taking guests.

Grants is a Route 66 town that lived on uranium. Ore was found in the sandstone north of here in 1950, and for thirty years this was the Uranium Capital, with mills, mines and a population that came and went with the price of yellowcake. The market collapsed in the early eighties and the mines closed. What is left is a long, wide main street — East and West Santa Fe Avenue, which is old 66 — running between mesas, with motel signs from the fifties standing over parking lots that are mostly empty. The Leisure Lodge is one of the survivors: single storey, doors opening straight onto the lot, exactly the kind of room where a man can sit for days without anyone asking his name.

Drive in from the east at sunset with the mesas going red behind the town. Then stand in the lot with the interstate humming a few hundred metres north. Jack chose to disappear here because nothing here asks questions. The town has not changed its mind about that.