Room
(2015)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps
predictably, the least of the Best Picture Oscar nominees in terms of box
office take turns out to be one the best. It would be spurious to get into a
debate over the chalk-and-cheese merits of Room
versus Mad Max: Fury Road, as both exhibit
an exemplary standard of filmmaking craft. Room
has been rightly recognised for Brie Larson’s invested, dedicated performance
(as affecting, if not more so, than her turn in Short Term 12), but equally laudable are young Jacob Tremblay (how
he didn’t earn a supporting actor nomination is beyond me) and director Lenny
Abrahamson.
About the only
thing Room has in common with Abrahamson’s
previous film, Frank, is the
difficulty of getting inside the (papier-mâché or otherwise) head of its secondary protagonist. Larson’s Joy, that is
(and, respectively, Michael Fassbender’s Frank). She has been abducted and imprisoned
in a 10-foot-square, soundproofed garden shed, routinely raped by her captor
over a period of seven years, her light and salvation the five-year-old son she
would do anything to protect. There’s no articulating her resulting emotional
state, and wisely Abrahamson doesn’t try.
An apt
scene finds the reunited Joy flaring up at her mother Nancy (Joan Allen),
unable and unwilling to relate her feelings and experiences. She believes, possibly
rightly, possibly not, that Nancy won’t be able to cope. Later, a touching
moment finds Nancy silently processing as Jack (Tremblay) matter-of-factly and
devastatingly explains how he would retire to the closet when Old Nick (Sean
Bridgers) visited Joy. While Jack, shielded from trauma during his years in Room,
is able to adapt to this vast new world, Joy faces a new kind of nightmare, one
in which she holds no hope of being understood.
Escape is
no release. She finds herself in a different kind of prison, best illustrated
by a television interview in which Wendy Crewson’s hostess assassinates her
with understanding. Ruthlessly, but
using the same sympathetic tones, she repositions Joy as the guilty party for failing
to persuade Old Nick to give Jack up for adoption. In due course, we leave
mother and son on a telling note as, revisiting Room at his request, Jack
discovers it to be impossibly small and absent of the warmth and comfort it hitherto
held; it’s no longer the whole world, or Jack’s Wonderland. While he simply loses
all interest, Joy spends her time there just wanting to leave; she may say
goodbye to Room with Jack, but she doesn’t have his closure.
Abrahamson’s
direction is extraordinarily intimate and empathic. Within Room, he enables us,
via Danny Cohen’s cinematography, to experience the meagre surroundings through
Jack’s eyes: the entirety of existence in a microcosm (contrastingly, when we
see Room from Joy’s perspective it is a place of claustrophobia, entombment and
isolation). Yet the progression from there, through Jack’s daring escape into
an uncanny environment of un-Room exteriors, unfamiliar faces, hospital floors,
grandparents, and pets, is one that elicits fear, bewilderment and then, by
incremental turns, adaptation and integration. Notably, the shed housing Room
is revealed as a totally unremarkable garden shed in a totally unremarkable
neighbourhood (not unlike the exterior of the house in the Elisabeth Fritzl case, the inspiration for Room).
Tremblay’s
performance is entirely natural and immediate, while Larson’s is simply heart-breaking.
Allen is hugely sympathetic as the mother (the haircut scene is quite
wonderful). Tom McCamus (I can only assume the someone on the production was an
Orphan Black fan, as they share
several cast members, including Amanda Brugel’s hero cop and Joe Pingue’s
useless one), slightly dishevelled and boggle-eyed, initially feeds on our, and
Joy and Jack’s, uncertainty as Nancy’s boyfriend Leo, yet proves to be the sensitive
rock where ex-Robert (William H Macy) cannot even bear to lay eyes upon his
grandson.
Stephen
Rennick, Abrahamson’s regular composer, provides a low key, evocative piano
score, one that reminded me a little of Jon Brion’s work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I
haven’t mentioned Emma Donoghue’s screenplay, adapted from her 2010 novel. She
is acutely insightful throughout, avoiding spelling things out or overstatement.
Although, if I were to raise a minor niggle, the faux-pint-sized philosophy Jack
pronounces as narrator is occasionally a little florid, more suited to gilded
affairs such as The Young and Prodigious
T.S. Spivet or Extraordinarily Loud
and Incredibly Close than Abrahamson’s immersive, heightened-yet-simultaneously-grounded
realism. Nevertheless, his film is a powerful, perceptive, wholly immersive
experience, one that avoids both sensationalism and tying a bow around its
fraught subject matter.
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