Caged Birds

Movies: Room

 Spoilers in this review

Woof. You guys, Room is a challenging--yet so rewarding--film.

To be clear, I'm not taking about auteur Tommy Wiseau's film The Room, which is also "challenging" and "rewarding" in its own ways, but rather the film based on Emma Donoghue's wonderful novel about a woman and her child who are held captive in a garden shed by a monsterous man.

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue herself, Room is both an emotional gut punch and also a deeply moving ode to the relationship between a mother and her child, as well as the joys and aches of growing up.

Like the novel, Room is told primarily from Jack's five-year-old perspective. To him, the 10x10 ft room he inhabits with Ma (a stunning Brie Larson) is the entire world and contains everything he will ever need. It's a paradise filled with time for play, TV (which he doesn't understand is pictures of actual things in the world), and cuddling with Ma.

For Ma--whose real name is Joy--the room is hell on earth. Kidnapped by "Old Nick" (Sean Bridgers), a man whose real name she doesn't know, at age 17, Joy has been in the room for 7 years. Jack is obviously Old Nick's biological son, the product of the nearly daily rapes Joy endures, but instead of hating and resenting the child, Jack is Joy's entire reason for living.

Joy lets Jack believe that there is nothing outside the room and Old Nick brings them groceries and clothes via 'magic'. Jack's way of thinking goes like this: "Spiders are real. And that mosquito that once was sucking my blood. But squirrels and dogs are just TV." But once Jack turns five, Joy begins to tell him the truth--there's a whole world outside their little room and they are not in the room by choice. Jack rejects this thinking at first, but Joy keeps pushing him in the hopes that she can hatch an escape plan by tricking Old Nick into taking Jack to the hospital.

The first half of Room focuses on Jack and Joy's life in the room. The second half is their reorientation to society after their escape. I mentioned spoilers at the beginning of this review, but the fact that they do escape is simply the plot. Life outside the room is still relatively traumatic for both Joy and Jack. Joy is very depressed, mainly because she has been depressed her entire time in the room and can't magically snap out of it now that she's free. Larson understands what depression looks like: both in the room and out of it, Joy rarely cries. Instead, she maintains a blank expression and sleeps a lot. Back in the room, she would have entire days where she wouldn't get out of bed--Jack referred to those as "gone days"--but she would pull it together for the sake of her son. She also trained herself to be docile and agreeable to Old Nick when he showed up, not wanting to incite violence in him. Joy puts her mind and emotions on autopilot just to get through each day as a captive. I love that Larson doesn't overplay the intense emotions her character must be feeling--there are no crying jags or screams of despair. Just a lot of surviving.

As for Jack (played by the remarkable Jacob Tremblay), he adjusts with a little more ease since he is, as a psychologist puts it, "still plastic". He's young enough to basically have his entire world turned upside down and still adapt pretty easily. At first, he doesn't understand that there are new rules to go with his new world, and some of the old rules he followed in the room don't apply any more. He also insightfully points out that that there is less time in the outside world than in the room because "[time] has to be stretched out over all the new places". Pretty smart!

There are a lot of issues that novel covers more deeply than the film--for example, Joy's father has a difficult time accepting Jack as his grandson, given that Jack's father is the man who took his daughter away and brutalized her for years. William H. Macy plays the rather thankless role of Joy's dad, showing up to make this point, then exiting the film. Joan Allen plays Joy's mom, who bonds beautifully with Jack.

Another issue the book explored that the film only touched on is Joy's experience with speaking to the media about her captivity. A talk show host feigns sympathy, only to ask Joy if keeping Jack in the room with her instead of trying to convince Old Nick to drop him at a hospital was "best for Jack". The absurd cruelty of this question--i.e. you might have been the victim of captivity and daily rape, but gosh, why weren't you a good enough mother?--skewers the culture of shame and judgement mothers face no matter what decisions they make. Donoghue spends more time exploring this issue in the book, but we only get a taste of it in the movie.

Instead of exploring these issues, Room focuses on Jack and Joy's relationship. One thing I really liked is that once they're out of the room, Old Nick is basically gone from the movie. There's a mention of his arrest on TV, but we don't see him again or learn his name or any details about him. I think this was a conscious choice on the part of Donoghue--once Jack and Joy escape his clutches, he has no power over them (I mean, other than the lingering power of the trauma he caused). But by refusing to focus on him, Room solidly remains about Jack and Joy.

What keeps Room from being completely devastating is Jack's perspective. As I mentioned above, the room itself is not a cage to Jack, but literally the whole world. When he escapes into the actual world it overwhelms him at first. But soon he sees the excitement and adventure in exploring a universe that is larger than he ever could have imagined. There are times when Jack misses Room (as he refers to it, with no "the" in front)--the way a child with a new bed might miss his childhood crib. That sense of security is gone. While Room is a story of survival and motherly devotion for Joy, it's a story of growing up and out of the fantasies of childhood for Jack--and the acute sadness that accompaniesthis maturity.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone, although it may be harder for some people to watch than others. If you think the movie might not be for you, then instead try reading the book. It might be easier to absorb the story through words rather than images. And it's a story worth reading.

Grade: A