Top 25 Favourite Films: #7 The Room (Dir. Tommy Wiseau, 2003)
#7. The Room. Directed by Tommy Wiseau, 2003
Johnny pushes the door open and walks out onto the rooftop, downtown suburban San Francisco in the background. He's distressed, a little disheveled, carrying a bottle of water that, like Chekov's gun, is there simply for the character to throw as his anger rises. He's already talking to another character, though the scene almost touches on silloquay, as he enters-by now in the film, his fiance is clearly having an affair, his worklife is stagnant, and he feels betrayed by hearsay and his dismissive mother-in-law.
"I did not hit her!" he declaims. "It's not true! It's bullshit. I did not hit her!"
A pause, for emphasis
"I did not."
He, inevitably, throws the bottle, notices Mark (Greg Sestero), and, shaken from his reverie, finally acknowledges him with a "Oh, hi, Mark." The shot switches, to over Johnny's shoulder as he walks over and takes the seat across from Mark. Mark is sitting, cradling the football, that, like its role in Charles M Shultz's Peanuts, is practically a shorthand for male shortcomings, of Americana, of the trickery of the eternal Lucy, whisking the football just out of reach as the American man, the everyman, the eternal Charlie Brown, goes to kick it. The conversation continues
"Oh, hey, Johnny, what's up?"
Johnny takes his seat; behind them, the haze of San Fransisco looms. The rooftop is practically this film's crux-a number of the key moments occur on it, it feels important whenever a scene moves to it, and like the jury room in Twelve Angry Men (1957) it feels like a veritable crystalisation of American down to just a handful of characters
A pause, for emphasis
"I did not."
He, inevitably, throws the bottle, notices Mark (Greg Sestero), and, shaken from his reverie, finally acknowledges him with a "Oh, hi, Mark." The shot switches, to over Johnny's shoulder as he walks over and takes the seat across from Mark. Mark is sitting, cradling the football, that, like its role in Charles M Shultz's Peanuts, is practically a shorthand for male shortcomings, of Americana, of the trickery of the eternal Lucy, whisking the football just out of reach as the American man, the everyman, the eternal Charlie Brown, goes to kick it. The conversation continues
"Oh, hey, Johnny, what's up?"
Johnny takes his seat; behind them, the haze of San Fransisco looms. The rooftop is practically this film's crux-a number of the key moments occur on it, it feels important whenever a scene moves to it, and like the jury room in Twelve Angry Men (1957) it feels like a veritable crystalisation of American down to just a handful of characters
"I have a problem with Lisa. She said that I hit her"
Mark is visibly taken aback, but seems dismissive-we, the audience, already know that Mark is the guilty party, and armed with this knowledge, as Mark is, we see through his breezy veneer. Johnny, eager to move the subject on, eager to escape this potentially runious rumour, is equally flippant,
"No! It's not true! Don't even ask!"
Mark is visibly taken aback, but seems dismissive-we, the audience, already know that Mark is the guilty party, and armed with this knowledge, as Mark is, we see through his breezy veneer. Johnny, eager to move the subject on, eager to escape this potentially runious rumour, is equally flippant,
"No! It's not true! Don't even ask!"
And the web of deceit and lies that runs through the film continues. And whilst the scene continues, as the duo discuss life and the distinctly Othered female, these sixteen seconds sum the 2003 film The Room up. perfectly. These 16 seconds, numbering under 400 frames of 35mm film with post-production ADR'd dialogue, shot on a set replicating an existing location, with two cameras, (the 35mm and a digital camera) shooting two actors who, in 2003, had four credits between them (all Sestero, most notably a straight-to-video sequel to the already low budget horror series The Puppetmaster), is everything wrong with The Room in miniature.
I feel you cannot truly dislike The Room, in much the same way that one cannot truly dislike the work of Ed Wood, or Uwe Boll. Is it, and their work a catalogue of hilariously bad disasters masquerading as cinema? Undoubtedly. Are they enjoyable, even unintentionally? Yes. But The Room is more than just simply another bad movie; it is practically cinematic mythology, from The Disaster Artist, James Franco's adaption of Sestero's tell-all book about the making of the film, to its enduring legacy as the mother of all midnight movies, to its enigmatic and shadowy creator, star and producer, Tommy Wiseau, and indeed the question as to its very nature-drama gone wrong, or deliberately bad black comedy.
The Room is, as few films in cinema are, a rite of passage, in which the uninitiated are welcomed into a world of spoon-and-football throwing madness in which acting is an afterthought, an Olympian bobsleigher now running for The House of Representatives is the single best character who only appears for one scene, motivations, plot-threads and entire characters appear and disappear without explanation, an important beard trim occurs, and a director from unknown origins blows $6 million of untraceable money on a film he didn't know how to make. Welcome to The Room.
The Room is a film about a love triangle. about love and betrayal, about a man being betrayed by his friend and his fiance, until he is eventually driven to suicide. On paper, this would make at worst a decent drama, from high-tension thriller to baroque tragedy. (Un)Fortunately, The Room is none of these. It is, simply, a gloriously badly written mess, an adaption from what one can only hope was a somehow better play, set, as the title suggests, in one room. It is, simply put, a script (Wiseau covers almost every element in the film save for its score) written by a man who has, one can assume, never actually heard another normal person speak, written by a man who has never actually seen a film's script before.
It is spectacularly bad. Spectacularly bad is pretty much The Room in a nutshell.
This, after all, is a film that features repetitive scenes of Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and Johnnny having stilted, terrible arguments, stilted, terribly shot, sex-adding a complete lack of tact and knowledge of human anatomy to Wiseau's considerable talents-whilst Lisa's mother (Carolyn Minnott) occasionally pops up to announce that Johnny is a terrible man, and that she has cancer, in scenes that are so similar that they practically feel like alternative takes of the same scene. Characters appear-from oversexed teenagers who arrive in Johnny and Lisa's house to have sex, to Johnny's colleagues, to Mark (Sestero), deliver lines, and disappear, sometimes forever, in the case of Peter (Kyle Vogt), who is replaced for the final third by Steven (Greg Ellery) who simply replaces Peter, is given his lines, and carries on.
This would be forgivable if any of the performances were decent, if the actors were having fun, tearing into the piece melodramatically or with self-aware performances. But, whilst this narrative of deliberately self-aware work-one version of the ending, according to Wiseau, would have seen Johnny's weird stilted performance explained as the character is revealled to be a vampire, may be part of The Room's lengthy legacy, the original performances are, simply, dire, with two exceptions. The first is from Minnott, who gamely throws her all into playing a character who basically does three things-1) remind everyone she has cancer, 2)-Tell Lisa that Johnny is wrong for her 3) complain. She absolutely owns the role in a film where half the cast are barely in the same room as their characters.
Even on the rooftop scene where Denny, (a bizarrely creepy performance by Philip Haldiman, who essentially acts as an adopted son to Johnny, appearing in the house and, most bizarrely, the couple's bedroom during foreplay) is confronted by a drug-dealer, she is practically the only character who acts like a normal person, rather than an alien or someone with their brains scooped out. This brings us to Chris-R. Chris-R is the unsung hero of The Room. In another film, Chris-R would be simply another minor performance, completely unremarkable except for his shocking violence against a teenager, memorable, but not remarkable. In the completely insane gonzo world of The Room, however, Chris-R (Dan Janjigian) is nothing short of an acting masterclass-he's in the film for barely two minutes but in that time, his aims, intentions, character and performance are an oasis of actual competent acting in this otherwise disasterous film.
And at the centre of it all is Wiseau-The Room is practically defined by his performance-without it, in an alternate reality where Tommy stayed behind the camera, it's simply a drama with a hilariously overblown price-tag, bad editing, bad script and some so-so performances. All of which would still be Wiseau's fault, but I digress. With himself as Johnny, however, the film becomes a classic, but what makes his performance the highlight is, actually, a little hard to define-like Nic Cage in a string of undemanding straight to video films, it's a mix of badly-struck method acting, often incomprehensible yelling-I doubt Wiseau's third langauge is English, let alone his first-bad dialogue, and genuinely terrible acting.
And yet, you cannot look away, as Wiseau does his best James Dean impression, yells that "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!", as he lumbers from scene to scene with the grace of a bulldozer, yelling in broken English to his co-stars to "keep your opinions in your pocket", and other strangely quotable lines that feel like a mix between badly translated fortune cookies and Eastern European self-help books. It is an electrifying performance, even if it is a complete carcrash. It is at once wonderful and terrible, a performance of take after take, not to capture, in Kubrickian style, the raw insanity of the human condition, but because Wiseau couldn't remember his own lines, in which the film is essentially a vehicle for Wiseau to play out his fantasies of being a director, and an actor, into which a dozen or so cast and crew essentially became unwilling participants.
And yet, for all this, for all the secrecy and chaos and pure damn myth that has come to surround this film-a film so infamously legendary that its very making became cinema itself, in 2017's The Disaster Artist, a loving, if overly syccophantic homage to The Room, you cannot hate Wiseau and you cannot hate his creation. Is it auteur theory finally run rampant, albeit the work of an auteur that hasn't got a clue what he's doing? Absolutely. But there are dozens of films made by cinema's great auteurs that have not brought a fraction of the joy that The Room has for countless viewers, and felt much creepier and more exploitative than The Room ever was. But it's even simpler than its strange director's performance, even simpler than the complete lack of knowledge on what a film should be, that The Room represents.
The Room, simply put, is Wiseau's passion for cinema writ large. Is it a misplaced passion, that doesn't translate at any point of the film, which is, simply put, a hysterically bad mess? Absolutely. But for countless thousands, The Room is joyful in its act of creation, messy and terrible as it is. It is not merely a bad film, nor any manner of good, but its infamy, reputation and legacy, there are few films like it. What a story, huh?
The Room is a film about a love triangle. about love and betrayal, about a man being betrayed by his friend and his fiance, until he is eventually driven to suicide. On paper, this would make at worst a decent drama, from high-tension thriller to baroque tragedy. (Un)Fortunately, The Room is none of these. It is, simply, a gloriously badly written mess, an adaption from what one can only hope was a somehow better play, set, as the title suggests, in one room. It is, simply put, a script (Wiseau covers almost every element in the film save for its score) written by a man who has, one can assume, never actually heard another normal person speak, written by a man who has never actually seen a film's script before.
It is spectacularly bad. Spectacularly bad is pretty much The Room in a nutshell.
This, after all, is a film that features repetitive scenes of Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and Johnnny having stilted, terrible arguments, stilted, terribly shot, sex-adding a complete lack of tact and knowledge of human anatomy to Wiseau's considerable talents-whilst Lisa's mother (Carolyn Minnott) occasionally pops up to announce that Johnny is a terrible man, and that she has cancer, in scenes that are so similar that they practically feel like alternative takes of the same scene. Characters appear-from oversexed teenagers who arrive in Johnny and Lisa's house to have sex, to Johnny's colleagues, to Mark (Sestero), deliver lines, and disappear, sometimes forever, in the case of Peter (Kyle Vogt), who is replaced for the final third by Steven (Greg Ellery) who simply replaces Peter, is given his lines, and carries on.
This would be forgivable if any of the performances were decent, if the actors were having fun, tearing into the piece melodramatically or with self-aware performances. But, whilst this narrative of deliberately self-aware work-one version of the ending, according to Wiseau, would have seen Johnny's weird stilted performance explained as the character is revealled to be a vampire, may be part of The Room's lengthy legacy, the original performances are, simply, dire, with two exceptions. The first is from Minnott, who gamely throws her all into playing a character who basically does three things-1) remind everyone she has cancer, 2)-Tell Lisa that Johnny is wrong for her 3) complain. She absolutely owns the role in a film where half the cast are barely in the same room as their characters.
Even on the rooftop scene where Denny, (a bizarrely creepy performance by Philip Haldiman, who essentially acts as an adopted son to Johnny, appearing in the house and, most bizarrely, the couple's bedroom during foreplay) is confronted by a drug-dealer, she is practically the only character who acts like a normal person, rather than an alien or someone with their brains scooped out. This brings us to Chris-R. Chris-R is the unsung hero of The Room. In another film, Chris-R would be simply another minor performance, completely unremarkable except for his shocking violence against a teenager, memorable, but not remarkable. In the completely insane gonzo world of The Room, however, Chris-R (Dan Janjigian) is nothing short of an acting masterclass-he's in the film for barely two minutes but in that time, his aims, intentions, character and performance are an oasis of actual competent acting in this otherwise disasterous film.
And at the centre of it all is Wiseau-The Room is practically defined by his performance-without it, in an alternate reality where Tommy stayed behind the camera, it's simply a drama with a hilariously overblown price-tag, bad editing, bad script and some so-so performances. All of which would still be Wiseau's fault, but I digress. With himself as Johnny, however, the film becomes a classic, but what makes his performance the highlight is, actually, a little hard to define-like Nic Cage in a string of undemanding straight to video films, it's a mix of badly-struck method acting, often incomprehensible yelling-I doubt Wiseau's third langauge is English, let alone his first-bad dialogue, and genuinely terrible acting.
And yet, you cannot look away, as Wiseau does his best James Dean impression, yells that "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!", as he lumbers from scene to scene with the grace of a bulldozer, yelling in broken English to his co-stars to "keep your opinions in your pocket", and other strangely quotable lines that feel like a mix between badly translated fortune cookies and Eastern European self-help books. It is an electrifying performance, even if it is a complete carcrash. It is at once wonderful and terrible, a performance of take after take, not to capture, in Kubrickian style, the raw insanity of the human condition, but because Wiseau couldn't remember his own lines, in which the film is essentially a vehicle for Wiseau to play out his fantasies of being a director, and an actor, into which a dozen or so cast and crew essentially became unwilling participants.
And yet, for all this, for all the secrecy and chaos and pure damn myth that has come to surround this film-a film so infamously legendary that its very making became cinema itself, in 2017's The Disaster Artist, a loving, if overly syccophantic homage to The Room, you cannot hate Wiseau and you cannot hate his creation. Is it auteur theory finally run rampant, albeit the work of an auteur that hasn't got a clue what he's doing? Absolutely. But there are dozens of films made by cinema's great auteurs that have not brought a fraction of the joy that The Room has for countless viewers, and felt much creepier and more exploitative than The Room ever was. But it's even simpler than its strange director's performance, even simpler than the complete lack of knowledge on what a film should be, that The Room represents.
The Room, simply put, is Wiseau's passion for cinema writ large. Is it a misplaced passion, that doesn't translate at any point of the film, which is, simply put, a hysterically bad mess? Absolutely. But for countless thousands, The Room is joyful in its act of creation, messy and terrible as it is. It is not merely a bad film, nor any manner of good, but its infamy, reputation and legacy, there are few films like it. What a story, huh?
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