ROOM (Lenny Abrahamson 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

LENNY ABRAHAMSON: ROOM (2015)

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BRIE LARSON AND JACOB TREMBLAY IN ROOM

The comfort of the abyss

W A R N I N G: S P O I L E R S

Instead of approaching a kind of nihilistic absurdity, the strange punk avant-garde band of Frank, in which the talented Michael Fassbender never emerged from inside the self-conscious conceptual prison of a giant balloon mask, this time the Irish director Abrahmanson (formerly Leonard, now gone Hollywood-chummy as "Lenny") has turned his taste for edge in a more emotionally challenging, socially significant direction by filming Emma Donoghue's novel (in her own effectively simplified and telescoped script adaptation) about a real prison. Room is about a woman kept as a sex slave by a demented psychopath for seven years, trying to maintain some semblance of sanity and normalcy for her little boy born in captivity while both are confined to a ten-by-ten-foot space. Jack (Jacob Tremblay), the boy, who celebrates his fifth birthday in the opening sequence, is the linchpin of the action. Events are shown from his point of view, and his periodic voiceover, describing a hermetic world, frames the tale. Their escape is engineered through him. Arguably there is more emotional validity than verisimilitude to Room, but it's an interesting and emotionally powerful story.

The first half is intriguing, grimy, vivid, appalling, touching, and increasingly nerve-wracking. Ma (Brie Larson) has been conditioning Jack to believe that their place of confinement, which she has dubbed "room," a garden shed supplied with toilet, water, hot plate, electricity, and TV, is the world. But now she gradually teaches him the truth and trains him to carry out a scheme to escape.

This story is based on events that we know occur, but the details are invented, and allowing for the fact that truth is stranger than fiction, some willing suspension of disbelief is required. Wisely, and no doubt plausibly, the captor, whom Ma and Jack refer to as "Old Nick" (Sean Bridgers) is a bland and, since this is meant to dramatize Jack's point of view, rather vague figure. Ma seeks to keep him out of Jack's sight by shutting Jack in a wardrobe to sleep before "Old Nick" comes for his nightly visits. But there turn out to be slats in the door through which Jack glimpses "Old Nick" and may vaguely perceive what goes on. The line between Jack's vague perception of what's going on and a certain vagueness in how the story's worked out is not always clear.

The way Ma eventually coerces and persuades Jack to be the engine of their escape is both horrific and brave. You may consider its success either lucky or implausible. All this works as far as it does because of the claustrophobic intensity of the appalling situation the filmmakers and the actors evoke. After the time we've spent with Ma, Jack, and momentarily "Old Nick" in "room," the huge room in a hospital where Jack and Ma wake up has all the unreality and wonder Jack feels as she tells him this too is the world, and they're just in another part of it, and there are many more, and wondrous, parts. Everything is full of magic and expectation. Then they're taken to Ma's mom's house, where she now lives not with Ma's dad but a nondescript, curly-haired man named "Leo" (Tom McCamus), whose value for Jack turns out to be one: he has a dog.

The movie's problem is holding our interest with such trivialities after the escape, when the tension dissipates and the action, so intensely focused at first, begins to scatter in too many unplanned directions. Here, Abrahamson begins showing off some of the seemingly endless capacity for boring the audience that he displayed so lavishly in Frank. The story's powerful core, the all-encompassing relationship between Jack and Ma, gets fuzzy as they drift apart from each other at her mother's house and Ma herself begins to fall apart without the need to survive and protect her son to hold her together. This is a classic paradox -- that freedom is harder to handle than confinement -- but the film isn't composed and detached enough to draw out its ironies. Secondary characters such as Ma's neurotic, alienated father (an overwrought, tiresome William H. Macy) suck air out of already airless scenes; it's awful. And here with hospital personnel, therapists, journalists and TV interviewers the movie gets self-conscious and awkward in its point-making. We get it: middle class suburban American life is a prison too; the ordinary world can be confining and oppressive. Prison can be seductive, a safe certainty to return to. In confinement, Jack's and Ma's love was pure, the only thing. But so what? The real, deep problems of lingering psychological trauma to be faced in the aftermath are actually barely broached.

Luckily, as Ma's mom, Joan Allen is low-keyed and authentic, like Larson, and her scenes with the boy after Ma has had a nervous breakdown and gone to a clinic are natural and lovely. Room almost redeems itself in a final sequence where Ma and Jack, at Jack's request, go back and revisit "room," which has been dismantled and now appears "shrinked" to Jack. The possibility of normalcy for both of them appears, and the movie ends on a hopeful but still realistic note. Abrahamson gets points for finding this challenging topic and not hamming it up; for collaborating effectively with the novel's author; and for assembling a cast including the excellent young Tremblay, the selfless, quietly believable Larson, and Joan Allen. There are heartbreaking, disarmingly real moments between Tremblay and Larson, and some magic ones between Allen and the boy, when she cuts his long hair. Some of that is hardly acting. But Tremblay is an actor, and when he says, "I love you, Grandma," that's acting. Isn't it?

Room, 118 mins, debuted at Telluride Sept. 2015; also Toronto, Vancouver, London. Limited US theatrical release 16 Oct. 2015; wider, 25 Nov.; UK 15 Jan. 2016.

[tabuno]

Interestingly, I had the very opposite problem with the movie than Chris. It was in the limited confines of the shed that almost drove me crazy with boredom and lack of tension, while the exposure to the real world was delicious and at the same time scary place. I was fascinated by the grandfather's dissociation and disgust and while Chris had problems with what for him was the mundane "trivialities" of the real world, I found new wonder and a new perception of such normalcy or "civilized" crowded ways of experiencing. It seems Chris sought clarity where clarity wasn't important for the essence of the movie. It is important to judge this movie as it was scripted, from the point of the view of the child and the judgment of whether or not the mother was an adequate mother or had she really sought her own selfish interest in making sure her child stayed with her for her own reasons. Overall, perhaps for what Chris seems to insistently have problems with this movie, I too, have them, but for more unclear, vague, uncertain reasons, found this movie delightful, insightful, compelling and yet missing something. But perhaps this belief too is to forget who the movie really is about, Jack, not me.

[Chris Knipp]

Finding the early part dull may show a misunderstanding of the narrative necessities on tabuno's part. Thus, Justin Chang, Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/festivals/telluride-film-review-brie-larson-in-room-1201584736/):
Those who have read the book will be struck immediately by some of the compromises that Donoghue and Abrahamson have had to make here. In the book, the extended daily monotony of life in Room, imagined down to the smallest detail, is utterly crucial to the story’s sense of duration and claustrophobia; the onscreen version can’t help but feel rushed by comparison. On the other hand, what Chang says about the post-shed part of the film support's tabuno's feeling that it's richer:
In another kidnapping/survival yarn, that would be the end of the story, and a perfectly happy one at that. It’s here, however, that 'Room' becomes altogether richer and more complicated as it delves into the lingering shellshock that afflicts Ma and especially young Jack, who is understandably overwhelmed by his immediate impressions of the outside world. Personally, it is not that the second half is lacking in 'richness,' exactly, so much as that it contains jarring notes, most of the new characters (escept Joan Allen's) being unconvincing or awkward. I think we can agree that the film had distinctive qualities (in contrast to Abrahamson's previous FRANK, which I loathed), but that it's flawed, though for different reasons.

[tabuno]

Isn't it possible that the second half characters were by their very nature awkward because of the complete sharp and jarring differences in social development and experiences between the adults and a child raised in an alien environment that made these scenes awkward? If so, such awkwardness would be a reflection of the "convincing" performances achieved by the actors in the second half of the movie.

[tabuno]

I can imagine a better first half of the movie using a different camera technique than used by the director. There must have been a sense of ordinary but wonderful exciting normalcy within the Room by Jack's perspective that wasn't readily captured by the director. Instead I imagine a more focused attention to detail, the visceral experience using the camera to enhance the photographic and sensory experience of sight of a child brain brought up by a considerate mother that offered a more rich and compelling first half of the movie even within the time constraints of film. A more lavish, close up of saying hello to the sink or other objects, more focused, child-like attention to the jumping around and running back and forth much like Jack's scene within the rolled up rug in the truck that the director sporadically used. The problem I think wasn't the problem with the use of film, but its adaptation to the film by the scriptwriters which failed to convey not the monotony (which I didn't believe Jack experienced at all) but perhaps the fear on the part of the filmmakers that they couldn't but avoid monotony, mistaken though it was, from standpoint of humans who lived in the outer world. The filmmakers brought they own perception of monotony into the film version instead bringing the more involving book scenes into a film version.

[Chris Knipp]

The filmmakers brought they own perception of monotony into the film version instead bringing the more involving book scenes into a film version. Then you read the book? I have not, so I cannot comment. In any case, obviously, as reviewers who have read the book, including Justin Chang, explain, a great deal of telescoping has to be done. It is you who find the film's first section "dull." I don't. And I'm not aware that other viewers do.