Further Thoughts on Room

Difficult as it is to watch, Room has a lot of interesting ideas going for it.  When I saw it, however, one thought kept rising to the top:  I can’t imagine being in Ma’s shoes.  And I don’t just mean the abduction or abuse, although that’s obviously horrific.  Rather, I mean the struggle of deciding how to raise Jack in such reprehensible conditions (contains spoilers.)

I completely get why Ma initially spins Jack the fantasy of Room being the entire world, with the trees, dogs, other people, and everything else he sees on TV being purely fabricated.  Their situation is untenable, and I don’t blame her at all for wanting to shield Jack from that horror.  Just like she hides Jack in the wardrobe when Old Nick comes in, she hides the ideaof an outside world from Jack.  She doesn’t want him to know that he’s a prisoner, and what’s more, she doesn’t want him to envy everything the world outside Room has to offer.  If he thinks grandparents and soccer games are “just TV,” the fact that he’s cut off from those things won’t bother him so much.  He can be surprisingly happy in Room if he thinks that’s all there is.

As time goes on, however, Jack’s contentment in Room is a new horror in itself, because Ma can’t allow him to come of age there.  She can’t let Room be his “normal,” and so, despite the enormity of it, she has to tell him the truth.  It breaks her heart to destroy that innocence, but she has no choice.  Additionally, she’s realized that her only hope for getting Jack out depends on his help.  She needs him to believe the reality of their situation, because what she needs him to do is monumentally dangerous/scary and he won’t do it unless he understands the stakes.

Unfortunately, Ma’s old fairytale is so convincing that Jack won’t believe the world is larger than Room.  He rails against her true explanation, insisting that she’s trying to trick him.  This is in part because the truth is so awful – of course he doesn’t want to believe that there is a world out there but that a predator kidnapped Ma and refuses to let her and Jack leave Room, hurting her night after night.  No one wants to believe something like that.  Another reason for his denial is the simple fact that the fantasy is all he’s ever known.  Ma has just refuted his entire worldview.  How is a 5-year-old meant to wrap his head around that?  He’s lived his whole life within four walls.  Having been explicitly told by his mother – in his mind, the only other “real” person in the world – that there’s nothing else, and having seen nothing to contradict that, it’s no wonder he accepts the story and becomes upset when the truth intrudes on it.

And Ma hates to do that.  She hates that she has to tell him.  She doesn’t want to hit him with terrible truths that he can’t comprehend, and she doesn’t want to send him on an escape mission.  Her top priority is always protecting Jack.  She hides him from Old Nick, she provides for him as best as she can, and she allows herself to be abused by Old Nick for Jack’s sake, “cooperating” to ensure that Jack has food, vitamins, and heat.  Any attempts at escape have always had their true intentions shrouded from Jack – for me, one of the most affecting moments of the film is the scene in which Ma and Jack both scream as loud as they can, to see if the “aliens in outer space” can hear them.  As the scene is framed, it’s clear that this is a regular “game” Ma has them play.  But these efforts yield no results, and if Jack is going to get out, he needs to be proactive in his own escape.  He has to be brave, follow multi-step directions, evade Old Nick, and pass on a message to someone who can help.  And in order to do all that, he hasto understand what’s going on.  And so, the only way to really protect him is to shatter his impression of the world.

Room (2015, R)

I’ve never read Room, and I’ve never been sure it’s one I need to read.  I’m still on the fence as far as the book goes, but the film, while intense, is gripping and incredibly well-done.  It paints a tight, unflinching portrait of two people facing up against an impossible prison (premise spoilers.)

5-year-old Jack has always known the world as he’s known it.  The world is a Room, with a bed, a wardrobe, a toilet, a sink, a bathtub, a table, two chairs, a TV, a door, and a skylight.  He, his Ma, and the things within Room are real.  Everything else is “just TV” – except perhaps Old Nick, who comes at night while Jack hides in the wardrobe, bringing them food and other necessities by magic.  This is life as he understands it, and it’s what Ma has always told him.  But not anymore.  Now, Ma tells him the truth.  Outside Room, there’s an entire real world filled with the real things that TV depicts, not invents, and Ma used to be one of them.  Until Old Nick took her and trapped her inside Room.  Now, Ma needs Jack’s help so he can escape and see that world.

We’ll start with the acting.  Brie Larson, as Ma, is the leading actress frontrunner (sure thing?) at the Oscars, for obvious reasons.  Her portrayal of Ma’s desperation, exhaustion, resourcefulness, love, rage, depression, reassurance, courage, and terror is masterful.  She’s so magnificent, but at the same time, so subtle.  Even though Ma’s circumstances are massively extreme, she doesn’t feel like a “big, Oscary role.”  She feels like a person, doing what she can to get her and her son through extreme circumstances alive.  Young Jacob Tremblay brings as easy artlessness to Jack, always coming across as genuine despite his environment.

Any time you see such great work from a really young actor, you look to the director, and Oscar-nominated Lenny Abrahamson does his job admirably.  In addition to bringing out Tremblay’s performance, he skillfully conveys just how small and claustrophobic Room is, while at the same time making the single, limited space feel cinematic.  Just as we can see how horrific Room is, we can understand why Jack doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

Emma Donoghue (also nominated) adapts her own novel.  Again, I haven’t read the book, but since the author and screenwriter are the same person, I assume it’s at least a reasonably faithful adaptation.  The story is riveting, the subject terrible yet engrossing; by focusing so much on Jack and Ma as people, Donoghue generally keeps the film from feeling like shock-value torture porn.  I will say that some of Jack’s dialogue, the way he words things with obvious capital letters and no articles – like Room, Wardrobe, and Skylight – feels off to me.  I get that his language for and understanding of things, like the rest of him, hasn’t had a chance to develop in the usual way, but his dialogue (and Tremblay’s delivery) is otherwise so fluent that it doesn’t quite work.  I think he maybe needed to be just a little more ungrammatical, and then the Room/Wardrobe/Skylight stuff wouldn’t feel so conspicuous.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, abuse (physical, sexual (not shown onscreen,) verbal, and psychological,) violence (including self-harm,) and language.