Tommy Wiseau’s The Room
Holy fucking
shit. It’s pretty rare that a movie
experience really leaves me shaking my head like this, but Tommy Wiseau has done it with his debut film The Room. Seeing as I have internet capabilities I have
seen many movies called ‘the worst movie of all time’ but usually in
reference to something like The Matrix Reloaded where you know it’s just
bullshit hyperbole and the person making the comments just felt level-headed
and accurate (bad traits) by simply saying something was not very good or not
what they expected etc. So when I heard
that The Room was “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”
(Entertainment Weekly) I was pretty sceptical.
But fuck me, it seems Entertainment Weekly’s ability to work out endless
theories on that show Lost have maybe helped them stumble onto the
secret to what may actually be the most enjoyably shitty movie ever made.
The film mostly
features a small cast of actors who act at a bad soap opera level. The kind of shit that
wouldn’t really stand out on something like Passions. But the real enigmatic centre is
writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau is a
graduate of The Christopher Lambert School of Acting. He has learned the powers of long flowing
black hair, making absurd pouty faces, but most importantly speaking poor
English with a totally ambiguous European accent and just seeming weird.
According to
online sources, Wiseau is very secretive about his
personal life, claiming to be born in the United States with European parents
and living in France for various portions of his life. Which is fine, I guess that puts him in the
same boat as me. But I have the good
sense to recognize I have a funny accent and behave kinda
weird and would not cast myself as an all-American guy named Johnny.
The Johnny
character is equally enigmatic as Wiseau
himself. A man who could be any age from
40 to 60 who’s sole mentioning of his own life story is showing up in San
Francisco with only a $2,000.00 cheque he couldn’t cash and sleeping at the
YMCA. Johnny is a bodybuilder with long
black hair who somehow became fabulously wealthy, owning several units in his
apartment building and paying to put an orphan through college. Johnny’s favourite hobbies are playing catch
with somebody three feet away and beating up drug lords. He decorates his apartment with latest Ikea
furniture and framed photos of spoons.
He allows his neighbours to fuck on his sofa when he’s out and is an all-around
nice guy.
Johnny wears a
suit and tie when relaxing around his home and little is said about his career
other than that he has been working at a bank for a couple months and was
passed over for a promotion he was counting on.
Johnny drives around in a nice car wearing bizarre suits that frequently
involve a suit jacket and really baggy dance pants of a clashing colour. Everybody in San Francisco seems to know and
like him, including dogs.
Johnny is
engaged to Lisa, who looks like a chubby Anna Farris. We get the obligatory passionate lovemaking
scene to show that they are very in love.
They fuck in a small bedroom overstuffed with candelabras on a bed
covered in mosquito netting while prodding each other with roses. I’d never before seen tittyfucking
in one these scenes that’s supposed to show how in love they are, but that’s
just one of this film’s many groundbreaking aspects. The fuck scene is pretty uncomfortable to
watch because of Johnny’s roided-out body convulses
in all sorts of gross ways and the scene goes on a really long time. If that wasn’t bad enough they actually
completely reuse the same footage the second time they fuck in this movie.
I guess this
movie takes place in a very traditional society because Lisa’s mother keeps
telling her how Johnny is her sole source of financial stability and although
she seems able-bodied, the idea of her getting a job
seems out of the question. Lisa’s mother
also mentions that she has cancer, but nonchalantly in passing and it is never
spoken about again. Lisa makes up shit
about Johnny such as pretending that he is a mean drunk who beats her. Lisa chugs scotchka
and fucks Johnny’s best friend, Mark, a good-looking guy with a beard like the
dude in Megaforce. Lisa continually rants to other people about
how she “wants it all” and how Johnny won’t be able to give her everything
she wants. But nobody ever asks her what
it is she wants that she isn’t getting or if maybe she’s just trying to sing
that Queen song.
Mark knows he’s
fucking Lisa. So does the couple that
fucks on Johnny’s couch. So does Lisa’s
mother. I think the orphan also kinda knows.
Johnny’s friend who is a psychologist knows Lisa is a demented
sociopath. None of them tell any of this
to Johnny. The movie tells the story of
a good man who can count on nobody and ultimately loses faith in humanity and
goes insane. I think it might be aiming
to be one of those mature relationship dramas like We Don’t Live Here
Anymore about how we adults can fuck our buddies’ wives and still hang out
and have beers and not discuss it or whatever but the way Tommy Wiseau goes about this film is just fucking insane. I also get the strong feeling that this is a
very personal movie and Tommy is aiming it at some woman who he believes broke
his heart in real life only he probably wrote this thing in a bout of desperate
heartbreak running on pure emotion and that’s why it’s a total fucking
mess. That and Wiseau
is a talentless weirdo.
You get all
sorts unbelievably unprofessional stuff.
Like Johnny asking Lisa “Is that a new dress?” when she’s not
wearing a dress; Mark asking Lisa “What’s with all these candles and
romantic music?” when there are no candles and no music can be heard. Half the shots in this film are out of
focus. There’s a wonky scene where the
characters are all inexplicably wearing tuxedos and decide to play football on
the pavement and the psychologist buddy trips and dies and it is never
mentioned again. You get all sorts of
continuity errors such as changes in what industry Johnny works in and how long
he’s been dating Lisa.
And there are
quite a few lines that get repeated several times throughout the movie with the
exact same emphasis on the same word every time. Lisa is only ever described as “so
beautiful”; Mark says “He’s my best friend” about a half
dozen times throughout the feature and the line “I don’t want to talk about
this” is probably the most used in the film. Characters frequently invite each other over
to talk, bring up a topic and then suddenly don’t want to talk about it and ask
the other person to leave. All the things
they bring up that seem pretty significant but are then never mentioned again
such as the mother having cancer, the orphan being a drug dealer, and so on
make this film positively mindblowing. Wiseau’s
performance as Johnny using his accent to mangle swear words (watching his lips
try to get around the word ‘motherfucker’ is like seeing a jellyfish eat
itself, and his quoting James Dean is purely add up to something purely
mesmerizing.
After the film
we are left with questions such as what the title meant seeing as there was no
one significant room in the film. But
most importantly we are left with the enigma that is Tommy Wiseau. And fuck if I won’t be shaking him out of my
head for weeks.
If you liked this, check out these other
related readings:
Paul Verhoeven
goes all about Eve!
I don’t have much to say
except this film receives my highest possible honour.
A Robostripper
Lindsay Lohan Production