I like Brie, the cheese and the actor! She came into my life with karmic swiftness to deliver a wicked uppercut to one of the most fearless, but media tone-deaf actors, Charlotte Ramping, by beating her and winning an Oscar for her performance in Room. I then proceeded to see her in anything but the movie that brought her to my attention, and her work is incessantly impressive on and off screen. If I had to have a famous person stranger randomly make life and death decisions for me, I would choose Larson. She is a living, breathing treasure.
I had so many opportunities to see Room, but with real life providing a plethora of girls and women who were once kidnapped, raped and bearing children in captivity, and my obsessive need to read everything about them, a fictional account felt like sacrilege. Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Elisabeth Fritzl, who inspired this story, got my support as a kind of reparations for their years of slavery. Their stories needed to be heard for all the years that they were silenced. I did not need to imagine such horrors. Why would you?
Room is an adaptation of a novel about Jack, a five-year old boy born under such circumstances, and we see captivity through his eyes. I kind of resent the premise while simultaneously thinking that it is brilliant. We have yet to hear the kids’ stories so there is still room for imagination, but it is also an effective way of distancing ourselves from the most disturbing parts of the story: the violence, the rape, the horrors of forced motherhood. I do not know if we need to avert our eyes from the worst aspects of humanity. We already do that when we miss clear signs of monsters in our midst and allow the nightmare to rob years from lives. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the author is actually intending to do so, but how I feel when a protagonist boy’s voice is centralized over his forced mother. It feels as if we are choosing not to listen to girls and mothers again. Still Emma Donoghue deserves credit for writing the screenplay for her novel before she even had a book deal. She does not need a vision board! She needs to have a side gig as a career coach.
Enough of my issues, how was the movie? Room is a movie that will make you feel, but I am not sure if I can recommend it for the same reason that it is a solid movie. It is so excruciatingly suspenseful and unbearable to know that this child is blissfully unaware of what a dangerous situation they are in that fairly early during the movie, I had to read a book summary of the plot. If you go into the film unaware of the plot, I could imagine that a viewer would initially be confused why a mother and child would be living in such an environment. I suppose that Jacob Tremblay does a seamless job playing Jacob because my brain was actively playing tug of war between the rational side reminding me that he is acting normally for a kid and my visceral side screaming that he was going to get his mother killed.
It took a long time for me to truly care about Jack’s perspective. Because I do know how big the world is, seeing shots from his point of view inside Room were more effective than those outside. When he makes a big sacrifice, I got teary eyed so he wins.
Unsurprisingly Larson killed it as Ma. At times, she communicates the excruciating desire for just a second away from her kid while also showing incredible maturity under nerve-fraying circumstances by responding to Jack’s bad behavior with love and warmth. She is stuck between the tyranny of two unreasonable people: a child who does not understand and a man with no empathy. She runs the full spectrum of emotion as she finds ways to cope with the impossible demands of survival and motherhood. Larson has to go toe to toe with Joan Allen, who is briskly refreshing, and it is the most electric scene in Room as she plays the scales. I always complain that movies are too afraid to make a character do unlikeable things because the filmmakers are concerned with alienating the audience, but Larson finds ways to explore the negative guilelessly. I so cannot imagine a person thinking otherwise that a plot twist regarding her parenting skills seemed inconceivable to me as if literally no one would ever consider it for a moment; however people love victim blaming and judging mothers so while I hope that people do better, I suppose that it is possible. I never heard of that happening in these cases, but people are trash so… Without Larson, the character could have gotten stuck being defined by her relationships, but she retains a core of fierceness and self that does not allow her to stay stuck in that sphere.
I have so many random positive notes about Room! May we never need a cop, but if we do, may that cop be like Officer Parker! I love the gentle men in this film, including Cas Anvar, whom I first saw in How to Get Away with Murder, as Dr. Mital. I wanted him to have more screen time, but it was also because I wanted more time with Larson as a recovering individual, not just a mother caring for a child.
The award for heart stealer is Leo, who is clearly auditioning for Mister Rogers’ levels of endearing and expert at interacting with people. I wanted an entire Room sidequel about him. How are you able to be home all day? Are you retired? What did you used to do? How did you meet your wife? Do you have kids? Why are you such a nice human being? Are you in the market to make new friends? How long have you had Seamus? When did you adopt him?
After seeing three of Lenny Abrahamson’s films, Frank, Room, and The Little Stranger, he is inconsistent and the overall trajectory of his films’ quality is not going in the right direction, but there are nuggets of narrative genius. He does not make bad or mediocre films, but it feels as if he does not quite understand when he has hit gold and is unable to sustain it. He is brilliant at conveying the emotion of a story, which is a great way to hide flaws. His best film is Frank, but I can see why Room won him accolades. It is a more conventional film in the feelings that he evokes. In Room, he is not always able to maintain the rigor of sticking with his child protagonist, but I cannot fault him for that when Larson is playing Ma. How can you not begin to shift focus when she is an option?
I am glad that I finally was able to watch Room, but even with the respectful distance that Donoghue and Abrahamson cultivate to eliminate the whiff of prurient curiosity, without Larson, it would still be too much to experience torture. She deserved that Oscar.