Room is a movie that you have to recover from. It’s a powerful, and terrifying experience that sacrifices its perfection to get to its audience in an almost profoundly devoted way. It works by using things that might be negatives toward it and shouldn’t benefit it. But they do. Room is a movie I will never forget. Room is a film about a mother, Joy (Brie Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay). They have been locked in a garden shed for years, Joy for seven, and Jack for five (take what you can from that). An escape plan is formulated, and now they must deal with the real world. It was a smart decision I think to put most of the film in Jack’s perspective. The room in the film is such a subtle type of environment that it requires the over the top sensitivity that only a small child could bring to it. Most of the actors seem to be over-acting, and it caught me off guard at first, but it soon occurred to me that this may have been intentional. The perspective of the small child creates comfortable ways that the adults act around him, and as soon as they start to deviate from this, the film becomes surprisingly intense. The best example of this would be his mother early in the film, who at first seems like a broken, but submissive person who is still kind to Jack — until she just snaps. I won’t go too much into this, but Larson’s performance goes from subdued to absolutely crazy in about a five minute window. Now that’s something that’s difficult to pull off, and much like the rest of the cast, Larson does it spectacularly. But more on that later. I want to discuss the fact that this performance actually mirrors how the film’s scene to scene tone goes. One minute it could be subdued, and the next it just goes batshit crazy. Now that’s actually the biggest problem I could find with the film. The individual tone from scene to scene is really quite scattershot, with performances being incredible but skewing from subtle to exaggerated. But in my eyes this actually didn’t hurt the movie too much. It becomes apparent that this tone shifting may have been intentional as well to invoke the uncomfortable nature of the film. I can’t imagine the escape scene would be as riveting as it truly is without the added baggage that the scene prior to it is intense, but also surprisingly subtle. This is a tough line to walk, but each shift tends to compliment the next. Now I can speak about the actors. Again it’s a little distracting to have such prominent shifts in performance between scenes, but the actors are excellent in all their roles. The film uses too much narration from the young Tremblay, but when that shuts up and lets him act the results are startling. Larson, as I’ve mentioned before, is ecstatically good, and she probably plays against the fluctuating tone the best. This really is a great cast though with Joan Allen, and, briefly WIlliam H. Macy, pulling in great work. I should take off points from Room for being so fluctuant, going from heavy handed to slight in a blink of an eye, but the fact is it works. This is a powerful piece of work that moved me. Can you ask for anything else? I give Room a 9 out of 10. REVIEW BY STEPHEN TRONICEK
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |