A Room with a Greenscreen View

THE ROOM (2003)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"You can cry, you can express yourself, but please don’t hurt each other. And that’s basically the theme of the movie. It’s a lesson to do better. Because we are better. We are much more intelligent." - Tommy Wiseau

I cannot give "The Room" a rating of any kind. Reasons are aplenty but the most singularly good reason I can think of is that this is not a movie. It has no real story, no narrative structure, no sense of style or semblance of anything resembling something you would pop in your DVD player or run through a projector. I've seen the late Stan Brakhage's own experimental, non-narrative films that confound many, but they seem to take place on Planet Earth and they are about something! "The Room" is nothing - a vacuum of nothingness. A Hoover vacuum cleaner has more to say. Throwing out the trash is an actual action a human being commits."The Room" is inactive, and inexcusably nothing. And yet it is so damn watchable, like a guy wearing rags, dragging a shopping cart and screaming about socialism! (Thank you, Woody Allen).

Tommy Wiseau is the actor-writer-director of this thing we call a movie. He looks vaguely Eastern European and speaks or rather warbles lines of dialogue like "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!," only with less conviction than Bugs Bunny. Tommy plays Johnny, a successful banker who lives in a condo of the "Red Shoes Diaries" variety with his fiancee, Lisa (18-year-old Juliette Danielle). He buys her roses and they have lots of sex. Sometimes a kid next door named Denny (Philip Haldiman) wants to get in bed with them...so they can all throw pillows at each other! When Johnny doesn't get his promotion at the bank, things go awry with Lisa and the movie. Lisa has relations with Johnny's best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), and she occasionally sweeps the floor when she isn't having a romp in the hay. Johnny gets wind of what is happening and records Lisa's phone conversations. Then we have endless scenes on the roof of the condo that looks like a studio; more soft-core sex scenes; inarticulate and unintentionally funny lines of dialogue; some football passes; an elongated party sequence and a shocking finale. This is the "kind" of movie where someone gets shot in the head and all a character can exclaim is, "are you okay?" This is also the "kind" of movie where a psychologist is almost thrown out of the roof of a building and the person who attempts the murder says, "I'm sorry."

Wiseau is the unusual case in most independently financed features - he spent close to 6 million to finance this picture, including buying two cameras (one 35mm, and the other a high-definition camera) and his own studio (Most indie filmmakers would dream of such an opportunity). However, Wiseau still shoots scenes on a mock-up of a San Francisco apartment rooftop with greenscreen! Amazingly, "The Room" first sought life as a play and a novel (neither of which became a reality) culminating in a screenplay that Wiseau spent five years writing. I am surprised it didn't take him five minutes.

I'd almost rate "The Room" as a good-bad movie but I can't. I don't know what it is. To me, it is the equivalent of an artist, from a while ago, who crafted a blank canvas and called it "The Rose." He may as well have called it "The Room."