As a drama:
As a comedy:
Net Rating:
Rarely has a movie so captivated my interest as The Room has. I had 4 friends show it to me over a few beers, and even a little buzzed, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The Room deserves two scores. As a drama, The Room fails spectacularly on ever level. But as a comedy? I have headaches after watching the movie because I’m laughing so hard.
The story isn’t really complicated. Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is an all-American guy (with a heavy Eastern European accent) living in San Francisco. He’s got a best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), and a future wife, Lisa (Juliette Danielle). All is not well for our hero though, because his work keeps not promoting him, and Lisa has actively started cheating on Johnny with Mark, his best friend. Tensions boil, drugs and drug dealers get involved, all leading up to Johnny’s birthday, where information is bound to spill out.
As a drama, there’s no other way to look at the room than an unmitigated disaster. Every decision made is the wrong one. The movie is shot using green screen that may or may not be hit by the actors at one point or another it’s so poorly placed and used. Tommy Wiseau dubs his voice over his lines, make the movie feel like a surreal dream. Characters make illogical decisions to push the movie forward, and sometimes immediately 180 on what they JUST said minutes earlier. You might be thinking wow, these are pretty bad reasons. Oh, these are just minor offenses. The screenplay is seeped in rampant misogyny, blaming Lisa for all the dumb things Mark and Johnny do. There’s a character, Denny (Philip Haldiman), who has no real reason to be in the movie other than watch Lisa and Johnny have sex and to buy drugs off a drug dealer. I’m not making this up. My personal favorite though: a character, Peter (Kyle Vogt), has a few scenes with Johnny for the first hour, then clearly was fired from the production, and was replaced by Craig Ellery with no explanation why the character knows anyone at the party. A production as much a mess as The Room is, will leave you feeling no sense of the drama Wiseau was going for.
And yet, not only can I not stop watching, but I eagerly await watching this film over and over again. This is because of how all these mistakes immersed in sincerity have led The Room to be one of the funniest movies I have ever seen, full stop. It’s effing hilarious when a woman tells us she has breast cancer and it never comes up in the story again. It’s effing hilarious when one friend threatens to throw another friend off a roof for a stupid reason. It’s effing hilarious when Tommy Wiseau thinks he is James Dean. Tommy Wiseau’s belief in himself and his vision gives the story a level of fascination that’s deeper than just laughing at a movie that’s phoned in, and you can’t stop contemplating why this alien type person though this was especially meaningful or made sense. Guaranteed: you will cry from laughter watching this, or this because of its sheer idiocy and because clearly some person thought those scenes were amazing, and had to be in his masterpiece.
When was the last time you saw Schindler’s List or Requiem for a Dream, two all time great films, get shown and pack houses at midnights across the entire globs? The answer? Never. Yet, The Room, this failed Tennessee Williams drama turned comedy, manages to pull this off for over 15 years and counting. Wiseau so thought The Room was amazing that he paid for it to be in theatres for 2 weeks so it could qualify for the Oscars. It took him 15 years, but he eventually got the recognition he wanted. It must have been TEARING HIM APART, LISA!!!