Review: Room
Jack is five years old and Room is the only home he has ever known. Room is where he and his Ma live for every second of every minute of every day. Inside Room, objects like Table and Sink are to be greeted like best friends. Outside Room is Space where aliens can't hear them even though he and Ma yell really really loudly.
What Jack (a strikingly excellent Jacob Tremblay) doesn't know, and what the audience comes to realise, is that Room is a sealed and soundproofed garden shed in which Ma (Brie Larson) has been held captive for seven years. Her captor, Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), arrives every night bearing food and supplies, makes the bed creak while he does something with Ma, and then leaves. Jack never sees all of Old Nick's face, only what he can glimpse through the slats of the closet he has to stay in when Old Nick is in Room. So when Old Nick is still in Room, asleep and snoring, late one night, Jack can't help but tiptoe in for a closer look.
The burst of violence that results spurs Ma to hatch a desperate escape plan. She knows they can't live like this forever and, with Old Nick revealing that he's been unemployed for the past six months, she fears that things may be worse that they already are. But first she has to convince Jack that there is a real world out there, that the people, places and animals he sees on television do exist, that they are live and not fantasy. Jack thinks she's playing a trick and when she tries to explain that she's only saying this now because he's old enough to understand, he sulks, "I want to be four again." He doesn't know why she's telling him that Old Nick stole her ("I want a different story," he shouts but she persists, "This is the story you get.") and the rising frustration in her voice is making him scared.
His fear and her anxiety provide the momentum to the film's most intense sequence as he and his Ma are separated and then reunited and rescued. The scene is undeniably, emotionally powerful and it's to director Lenny Abrahamson's credit that he maintains a tight grip on the narrative without losing sense of Jack's perspective, which dominates the film. Where Room sets itself apart from most survival stories is its exploration of the aftermath of having lived through something so unimaginable. Opening the door may mean freedom, but it also means leaving what one has known as home.
It may be odd to call a prison a home, but that is what Room is to Jack. It's a strange and scary place, this new world, with so many people and noises and things vying for his attention that it makes him feel "spread thin all over the place, like butter." Cinematographer Danny Cohen expertly conveys how such a claustrophobic room can, in Jack's words, go in all directions; meanwhile, the outside world may be larger but it feels emptier, more isolated and sometimes more frightening.
Ma's adjustment is as difficult. She should be happy, but she is angry that her mother and father (an exemplary Joan Allen and William H. Macy) have divorced in her absence and that her mother is now living with a new man (Tom McCamus). Life went on without her, and she wonders if she has the wherewithal to catch up and move forward. Larson balances tenderness and tough love in her portrayal. One is never in doubt of her fierce maternal love, but one can also empathise with her impatience at having to be his everything. One forgets that is only 24, still a child, who didn't have the same experiences as her peers.
Emma O'Donoghue has, for the most part, done a fine job in adapting her own critically-acclaimed novel. It's wise to compress the mundanities of their life as giving visual expression to those extremely detailed passages would have tried the viewers' patience. However, the diluted focus on Jack's increasing worry about his mother's independence undercuts the film's second half. Their readjustment is not only about learning to live in the world, but learning how to live without depending so much on one another. Still, for all its hiccups in both the script and a sometimes overly sentimental score, Room is a wrenching but rewarding film that further confirms Larson's immense talent.
Room
Directed by: Lenny Abrahamson
Written by: Emma O'Donoghue; adapted from her novel
Starring: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Sean Bridgers, Tom McCamus, Amanda Brugel, Joe Pingue, Wendy Crewson
