by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched one of the most
extraordinary recent movies either of us have seen: Room, a 2015 production of the National Film Boards of
Ireland and Canada based on a 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue, a Lesbian writer
from Great Britain (and her sexual orientation wouldn’t ordinarily be relevant
but I suspect it had something to do with the quite jaundiced, to say the
least, view of heterosexuality in this story). It’s a tale about a young woman
who was kidnapped at age 19 by a man who had set up a shed in his backyard in
which he could imprison her — the choice of her as a victim was purely
opportunistic but the crime itself was one he had been planning for some time —
and turn her into his sex slave. What makes Room especially moving and sets it apart from the way a
story like this would be (and indeed has been) treated on Lifetime is that the
entire tale is told from the point of view of Jack (Jacob Tremblay),
five-year-old son of the victim (Brie Larson), whom he addresses merely as “Ma”
through the first half of the story; Donoghue’s novel is narrated entirely from
Jack’s point of view, and though the film doesn’t use a voiceover, Donoghue
(who was given the job of adapting her book into a screenplay) manages
nonetheless to keep Jack front and center as the main character. When I read Room (which I obtained through the late and very much
lamented Quality Paperback Book Club — it’s since been absorbed into the
Literary Guild, an organization I have no desire to be part of) I was struck by
how good a movie it could be if
it got a director who could figure out a way to keep the movie interesting when
the entire first half of it is set in “Room,” Jack’s name for the enclosed shed
in which he lives with his mother and which is literally the only real world he’s ever known. For the most
part Room is an excellent film
that fully does justice to the book, though there are two scenes that are left
out of the movie, one of which goes far to explain the closeness of the
relationship between Ma and Jack. At one point we’re told that before Jack was
born, Ma got pregnant with another child, a girl, only her captor, “Old Nick”
(Sean Bridgers), took over and tried to midwife the baby himself, resulting in
her death, so when Jack was conceived Ma (whose name, after she’s rescued,
turns out to be “Joy,” a marvelous bit of irony) concealed her pregnancy from
him as long as possible and bore the baby herself without outside help. (The
other scene from the book I thought should have been included was one that takes
place after the rescue, in which Joy and Jack are in a shopping mall and Jack
is overwhelmed by the sheer number of unfamiliar stimuli and goes into culture
shock.)
The actual director, Lenny Abrahamson, does a superb job of keeping the
movie interesting when it’s located entirely within Room (one gimmick in
Donoghue’s novel is that Jack has been given a name for every object within
Room, and he refers to them all by a capitalized word with no article in front
of it: Chair Number One, Chair Number Two, Wardrobe — a portable closet in
which he’s expected to hide when Nick comes into Room to have sex with Joy —
Bed, Plant, Skylight, etc.) and modulating the change when Joy and Jack are finally freed from captivity at the midway point. The story
begins on Jack’s fifth birthday, when Joy has finally decided that he’s old
enough to understand the truth about his actual environment. Until then she’s
told him that what’s inside Room is the only reality in the entire universe —
everything else is Outer Space (that skylight is the only window in their environment, and at one point a leaf
is blown and falls on top of it, a red leaf from a deciduous tree in autumn,
which throws Jack because Ma has previously told him all leaves are green) and
TV World, so what we think of as reality Jack knows only from television (their
captor has allowed them a TV set, though sometimes he punishes Joy by cutting
off the power to Room and shutting down not only the TV but everything else
that requires electricity) and Ma has told him that this is a magic world that
exists only on TV. There are a
few aspects of Room the movie
that don’t quite match the film I was making in my head when I read Room the book — I would have wanted the credits to be
written in script made to look like a kid’s writing and I would have wanted Old
Nick (a name Donoghue said in an interview she got from an old British slang
term for the devil) to be kept virtually invisible, Val Lewton-style, shown
only in shadow and with his presence (when he comes into Room) suggested only
by dim, shadowy images and sound effects. The only time I would have wanted
Nick seen full-figure and in full light was when he was arrested for the
kidnapping, which in fact Abrahamson and Donoghue don’t depict in the film at
all (Joy and Jack simply watch a TV news reporter announcing that there’s been an arrest in “the Newsome case”).
One marvelous scene from the book that is reproduced in the film is the one when Jack, listening from Wardrobe
while Nick forces himself on Joy in Bed, tries to bring order to the event (of
course he has no idea what sex is or why Nick would want it) by counting the
number of strokes Nick takes when he’s fucking Ma and comparing how many it
takes before he finishes with how many he’s taken on previous occasions.
The
first half of Room takes place
entirely within Room, and Abrahamson deliberately made his job more difficult
by not building breakaway walls into the Room set — he wanted Larson and
Tremblay to be as closed in as the characters were (and according to an
imdb.com “Trivia” poster Larson deliberately isolated herself for two weeks
before shooting began, never leaving her home and denying herself access to a
phone or the Internet, and also living on the severely limited diet her
character is subjected to in the story) — so he had to get enough angles within
the cramped space to keep the movie visually interesting and using the
techniques of film not to open up the story but quite the opposite: to close us
in even more and give us a sense of Joy’s and Jack’s captivity that couldn’t be
achieved in a stage-play version of Room. My only quarrel with Room
is that the first half, when Joy and Jack are still captive, is considerably
more interesting than the second half, after they get out — using a stratagem
Donoghue “plants” by having Joy tell Jack the story of The Count of
Monte Cristo, in which the title character
escapes incarceration by pretending to be dead and having his presumed corpse
thrown out of the window of the prison where he’s being held. After an attempt
to fake Jack having a terrible fever so Nick will take him to the emergency
room, where he can tell someone on duty what’s actually happening to them and
how they live, Joy decides to tell Nick that Jack has died and he needs to open
the door to Room (it’s controlled by an electronic lock with a combination and
Nick forces Joy to look away every time he leaves Room so she can’t see what
the combination is) to dispose of Jack’s body. There’s a marvelous scene, at
once suspenseful and moving, in which Jack looks up from the bed of Nick’s
pickup truck and sees the sky for the first time — the whole sky, not just what
he could see from the skylight in Room — and Abrahamson keeps us guessing
whether Jack will be able to get out without injuring himself and whether he’ll
be able to meet another adult and convince him or her of his plight before Nick
recaptures him.
Another one of Donoghue’s ironies is that, despite Joy’s
memories of the outside world, her life is considerably more complicated and
not always happier outside of Room than it was inside. Joy’s own parents, Nancy
(Joan Allen) and Robert (William H. Macy) have split up while she’s been in
captivity, and Nancy has a new partner, Leo (Tom McCamus). Not surprisingly,
the relations between these three people are strained and Joy’s sudden
reappearance, though on the surface an occasion for unalloyed joy, only puts
more stressors on their lives. At one point Nancy tells Joy that she needs to
be “nice” — and Joy furiously responds, “I’m sorry that I’m not nice anymore,
but you know what? Maybe if your voice saying ‘be nice’ hadn’t been in my head,
then maybe I wouldn’t have helped the guy with the fucking sick dog!” — the
lure Nick had used to get her into his truck and take her captive in the first
place. Later Joy takes an overdose of psychotropic medications (in the book
Donoghue gave the impression it was an accident but in the movie she makes it
seem like a suicide attempt) and is rushed to the hospital, where ironically
she starts to recover because she’s once again in a structured environment
oddly similar to the one Nick put her in. The story ends with Jack insisting to
Joy that he wants to see Room again — he sees it with most of the possessions
taken away by the police as evidence against Nick and Door askew, left where
the police broke in to rescue Joy — and as in so much else in this fascinating
story it’s not all that clear that freedom is an unalloyed joy; for all the
horrors and uncertainties of his life in Room, it’s clear that Jack misses it
even though, far more than for most kids, leaving Room was a major rite of
passage for him. Room is a
success on every level except one — the acting is first-rate throughout; Brie
Larson won the Academy Award for playing Joy but to my mind the performance
that stood out was Jacob Tremblay’s as the boy (looking surprisingly
androgynous since his mother had no way to cut his hair — Nick wouldn’t allow
scissors or any other sharp objects in Room that Joy might use to attack him —
and she’s turned that into yet another morale-booster, comparing her son to the
Biblical Samson and saying that his long hair gives him strength; when she
O.D.’s he cuts off his own hair and gives the cuttings, tied together in a
ponytail, to his mom in the hospital). He turns in the sort of acting job that
I admire and which at the same time makes me wonder what the director had to
put him through to get it and what long-term damage it might do to the actor as
he grows up. The one element of the film I didn’t care for was the music by Stephen Rennicks; it’s the
sort of treacly piano-and-strings stuff Lifetime used to use for stories like
this before they started scoring them with sappy soft-rock songs instead.
Charles asked me if the book was as soap-opera-ish as the movie, and I suspect
it was Rennick’s glucose-ridden score, rather than the direction, writing or
acting, that made it seem so.
I will
give points to casting directors Robin D. Cook and Fiona Weir for finding three
actors — Joan Davis, Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay — that look enough alike
you can believe them as three generations of the same family (the casting of
people who don’t look much alike as biological relatives is one aspect of
filmmaking that often bothers me) — and the producers overall for making the
sort of movie you’re not supposed to be able to make anymore: a film that tells
a story without either milking the tear ducts or detaching us so much from the
characters we feel like researchers watching lab rats; a film that takes a
story idea that almost guarantees sensationalism and achieving emotional truth
instead (just compare this film to the Lifetime movie Cleveland
Abduction, based on a real-life case but
one whose makers used every tear-jerking gimmick in the book — as did the real
abductee whose published memoir Cleveland Abduction was based on, come to that); and a film that makes
us feel compassion, joy, sorrow and hatred in equal measure, one which leaves
us admiring the human spirit and instinct for survival even while detesting the
part of the human character that can pull off a crime like Nick’s kidnapping
Joy and get away with it for so long. One thing Room has in common with Cleveland Abduction is that it ironically (a word I’m using a lot in
these comments) shows how sexual kidnapping and enslavement have become
democratized. The people after whom sadomasochism was named, the Marquis de Sade and the Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, were landed European
aristocrats who had plenty of money so they didn’t have to work and could
explore their sexual shenanigans full-time. Like the real-life Cleveland story,
Room showed how you don’t need
that kind of money to pull off this sort of crime anymore — indeed, both Cleveland
Abduction and Room have plot lines in which the kidnapper is laid off
from his job and as a result conditions get even harder for his victims than
they were before — not only because he no longer has as much money to support
them but also because he’s more inclined to take out his economic frustrations
on his victims and thereby treat them even worse than he had before. And Room has another welcome element: the presence of the
marvelous Canadian actress Wendy Crewson, who appeared on a lot of Lifetime
movies a decade ago (including an occasional series in which she played a
police detective and An Unexpected Love, in which she’s a Lesbian who brings out a previously straight woman)
but whom I hadn’t heard of in a while and was glad to see again even though her
part here — an uncomprehending talk-show host who interviews Joy after she’s
freed — isn’t all that important and doesn’t do justice to her formidable
talents.
