The Disaster Artist

You don’t need to have seen the 2003 cult film The Room to appreciate The Disaster Artist, director and star James Franco’s hilarious ode to the talentless passion that birthed it. But I was glad that I had finally seen it for the first time just before I attended a screening of The Disaster Artist. Because I’m not sure I would have believed Artist’s depiction of the astonishing awfulness of The Room, in which Franco reproduces essential scenes from the film in all their crummy glory, if I hadn’t already witnessed the horror for myself.

The Room is almost indescribably terrible. It’s so far removed from any appreciation of how stories are told, how movies are put together, and how human people behave that I could feel my mind actually boggling as I watched it.

I imagine a literally boggled mind is like curdled milk: The Room has caused my gray matter to thicken and go sour; the movie is funny in its ineptness but also enraging in the privilege its very existence represents, as the product of a wealthy white man who used it as a platform to air his entitled narcissistic grievances.

Franco (along with his brother Dave Franco, who also appears in the film) introduced the screening of The Disaster Artist that I attended, and he offered up one theory as to how The Room came to be. Evidently, it is rumored that Room writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau is, in fact, an alien who came to Earth and, having heard about movies but never having seen one himself, decided he’d have a go at making one.

Based on how utterly terrible the film is, this theory is entirely plausible, as The Disaster Artist only underscores. If Tommy Wiseau were not a real person – a real person who is by all reports at least as outlandish as he is depicted in the movie, possibly much more so – we would never buy him as a character. Not even as portrayed by James Franco, a man who isn’t only dedicated to pushing envelopes and playing with meta but who takes clear joy in such.

Franco’s Wiseau, truly one of the great performances of recent years, and not only because Wiseau is so damn bizarre, is a man of unplaceable accent (this becomes a running joke in Artist) and even more mysteriously bottomless resources.

He self-funds the multimillion-dollar production budget of The Room, a project he decides to create for himself when no one will give him an acting job, because he’s legitimately revolting as an actorly presence, impossibly clueless about the creepy vampiric vibe he gives off. This disconnect between how he sees himself – as romantic hero – and how he comes across to others is inherent to the humor and the horror of The Disaster Artist, and to understanding why The Room is so appalling.

Wiseau, with The Room, has nothing to say but “Woe is me!” It’s an absurd tale rife with emotional falsity and contradictory human behavior that nevertheless casts Wiseau’s Johnny as a supposedly good man who is treated appallingly by a supposedly nasty woman; every character in The Room is beyond a caricature, all in aid of depicting Johnny as a man unfairly wronged. (Franco reportedly stayed in character on set even when the cameras weren’t rolling, not just because it’s an actor’s tool to do so, but because he thought it would help the rest of the cast react as the cast of The Room would have to Wiseau’s tone-deaf people skills.)

The Room is itself only an extreme caricature of a movie zeitgeist that is dominated by stories whose scales are tipped to portray white men as abused underdogs who triumph (or don’t) in spite of the enormous odds against them. I wish The Disaster Artist offered even a hint that it was aware of how littleThe Room actually deviates thematically from Hollywood’s SOP. Its outrageousness is, in some ways, an accidental condemnation of Hollywood, in how it peels away the thin veneer supplied by, you know, technical competence and craft, to reveal the male insecurity and petulance at the core of far too much of what passes for studio entertainment.

But I didn’t let that quibble infect my enormous enjoyment of The Disaster Artist. I laughed out loud at its depiction of an all-consuming passion that is blind to the incompetence behind it, and unaware of the irony with which it would be received. The Room was a real Springtime for Hitler offered in all seriousness, without the calculated snark of The Producers behind it.

The Disaster Artist now brings in that knowingness, the consciousness that The Room was originally missing. This is the second half of the story that may not make it make sense, but does make it feel complete.

THE DISASTER ARTIST ( * * * 1/2) • Directed by James Franco • Starring James Franco, Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Seth Rogen • Rated R • 103 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte