The Disaster Artist—If you’ve never seen The Room, you probably should. An attempt at a sort of Strindberg-ish tragic love triangle, the 2003 drama, written and directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, has come to be celebrated as one of the most memorably bad movies of all time, and not without reason, and there’s a level at which it must be seen to be understood.
I would say that it’s especially important if you plan to see The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s new film about the conception and making of The Room. But I’m not sure that’s the case—the friend with whom I saw The Disaster Artist enjoyed it immensely without having seen The Room.
The jaw-dropping dreadfulness of The Room derives not from ineptitude or economic deprivation (it was professionally produced, with a budget in the millions) but from Wiseau’s seeming lack of understanding of the basics of how human beings normally behave and converse. It was like he fell to earth from another planet where the people have Eastern European accents but no other customs in common with earthlings. My favorite line in the film (it’s not referenced in The Disaster Artist) comes when Wiseau, as the hero, compliments his girlfriend on the surprise party she’s thrown him: “You invited all my friends! Good thinking!”
According to Greg Sestero, the model and aspiring actor who co-starred in The Room, and from whose like-titled memoir The Disaster Artist was adapted, Wiseau was a mysterious figure. His clothing and hairstyle suggested an Anne Rice vampire, and despite his accent and Tarzan-like syntax he claimed he was from New Orleans, and was opaque about everything else from his age to his apparently bottomless wealth. His work in the San Francisco acting class where he and Sestero met was tortured and incoherent, but also uninhibited in a way that Sestoro couldn’t help but admire.
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, traces Sestero’s strange but mutually supportive friendship with Wiseau which, along with professional frustration, gave rise to The Room. James Franco directs, with skill and comic clarity, but more importantly—way more importantly—he plays Wiseau. Man, does he play Wiseau. He plays the crap out of him.
Going in, I thought the movie might be at a disadvantage with me. First of all, while I was amazed, fascinated and convulsed by The Room when I saw it, I’ve never felt any strong inclination to see it again. It didn’t become the bad-movie favorite for me that it did for many others (The Disaster Artist opens with talking heads of some famous fans). I laughed hard at it, it’s almost impossible not to, but I didn’t feel altogether good about my laughter. Beneath Wiseau’s incompetence you can sense real pain, and also a streak of misogyny, that can make the movie a little poignant, and a little unsavory.
Secondly, I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for James Franco. He’s been in a number of good movies and I found him effective in some of them, often when his character wasn’t particularly likable to begin with. But he takes the role of Wiseau to a different level, or perhaps it takes him to a different level. It’s one of those cases of a character seeming to take over and possess an actor.
It’s a superb impersonation, but it goes beyond that—Franco’s Wiseau is mesmerizing and scary and hilarious and sad and maddening and lovable in a way that the real Wiseau, onscreen in The Room, is not. Of course, much of the comedy in The Disaster Artist derives from other people’s baffled reaction to Wiseau’s antics, and chief among these reactors is Dave Franco (brother of James), who’s excellent as Sestero, with his perplexed yet touchingly protective manner toward Wiseau. The cast also includes such notables as Zac Efron, Megan Mullally, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Jacki Weaver and Seth Rogen, mostly in smaller turns.
On the whole, The Disaster Artist is a triumph, small and improbable but definite. Like Tim Burton’s 1994 Ed Wood, it’s the story an artist of passion and vision but no talent, told by artists with passion and vision and plenty of talent.
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