Photo by Justina Mintz – © 2015 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
High atop the list of movies that are “so-bad-they’re-good,” standing head-and-shoulders above trash like Birdemic or Troll 2, there is Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 anti-masterpiece The Room. What started as an unseen, suspiciously financed disaster, Wiseau’s 90-minute ode to infidelity, martyr complexes, and close-range games of catch, evolved slowly into a cult phenomenon. The Room, unlike any other truly terrible movie, is screened in theaters regularly to this day, inspiring Rocky Horror-style audience participation and the continued maintenance of the figure of Tommy Wiseau as a sort of mythic, unexaminable genius-idiot. A friend of mine in high school allegedly watched The Room every day for four months. It is so bad that it is somehow, unbelievably, great.
If you’re in the target audience for The Disaster Artist, you probably already know this. What you might not know, and where the film (and the book of the same name, co-written by Room star Greg Sestero) finds its most captivating material, is how exactly it came to be; because The Room is not just the story of one man’s delusional vision, it is equal parts Wiseau and Sestero’s journey. Played here by the brothers Franco, The Disaster Artist weaves the making of The Room into the larger story of two men grappling with the merciless Hollywood system and each other as Sestero navigates Wiseau’s ineffable, petty, and downright alien nature. James is the stronger performer here – his eerily specific mastery of Wiseau’s melodramatic acting style, laughter, and drawling accent perfectly captures the mystery of his real-life subject while also genuinely humanizing him. Literalizing the brotherly nature of Wiseau and Sestero’s bond through casting, James plays well off his brother Dave, and their chemistry serves to carry much of the film’s rushed opening act and embolden the parts of the film which more directly deal with The Room’s nightmare production.
If The Room is easily identifiable as solipsistic, linear melodrama, yet markedly unique in its accidental absurdity and lack of any natural cadence or human behavior, The Disaster Artist’s offbeat qualities feel similarly unintentional. Masquerading as a biopic but playing more like a parody of the form, and occasionally foregoing narrative or thematic momentum for shot-for-shot recreations of The Room itself, the film doesn’t limit itself to any one way to tell this story, to its detriment. Sometimes it’s about Greg and Tommy’s relationship, and other times it’s far too focused on explaining the origins of fan-favorite moments from the original film, the same way any run-of-the-mill biopic uses its audience’s knowledge of the present to produce groan-worthy lines of period-piece foreshadowing. Even though Tommy is a truly terrible actor/director/writer, several scenes feel manufactured simply to have characters (many of whom do not appear in the book) remind him of how bad his movie will be, all the while winking to the audience.
The ensemble here is made up almost entirely of semi-recognizable comedians, and that would be distracting if it wasn’t so much fun. Only in this movie can you see Jason Mantzoukas and Hannibal Buress share the screen, and this is most likely the first and last time Nathan Fielder and Zac Efron will ever exchange dialogue in any form. The recreated scenes of The Room by this coterie of established actors are hilariously specific, but are still functionally useless to the story of The Disaster Artist. There is a lot of pandering here to a fairly niche audience; I can’t imagine that some of this stuff will appeal to anyone not already familiar with Wiseau and his creation.
Still, like the film it so clearly loves, The Disaster Artist is, beyond its faults, a joy to watch. Clocking in at roughly the same runtime as The Room’s 99 minutes, the film zips along, buoyed by James Franco’s performance and carried through by its affection for its source material. That anyone could make a film so terrible yet so watchable that even now, 14 years after its microscopic, single-theater debut, it is still being watched and examined, is a miracle. That any movie can capture its enigmatic existence so well, and so rapturously, makes The Disaster Artist a triumph.
The Disaster Artist is now playing at the SIFF Egyptian Theatre.
CAMERON FAIRCHILD | I Did Naaaaght | KXSU Arts Reporter