James Franco (2017)
I’d never heard of Tommy Wiseau or The Room, which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in. The film first appeared in 2003, since when it’s acquired cult status as one of the worst of all time (it’s been dubbed ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’). The Room cost around six million dollars to make and took $1,800 at the box office but its afterlife on the ‘midnight circuit’, on home media and as a video game is something else. Now James Franco has produced and directed and stars as Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, the story of the making of The Room. Franco falls one short of Wiseau’s credits: the screenplay is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber (adapted from the 2013 book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bessell.) I always look forward to watching James Franco but I was dubious about this film, assuming its effectiveness would depend heavily on prior acquaintance with The Room and fearing it was liable to be something in which the people on the screen had more fun than those in the audience. The fear persisted even after seeing the trailer for The Disaster Artist and aficionados of The Room may well get more from it than the uninitiated but I needn’t have worried – James Franco has made one of this year’s most enjoyable films.
A good part of why The Disaster Artist works so well is, I think, because it doesn’t do just what the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody disparages it for not doing:
‘… the comedy, for all its scenes of giddy wonder, never gets past Tommy’s mask of mystery; avoiding speculation and investigation, it stays on the surface of his public and private shtick, leaving little more than a trail of amusing anecdotes.’
Franco is recounting real-life events that beggar belief: ‘explaining’ how they came about would have risked cutting this very tall story down to size. As you watch, you continue to be puzzled as to how old Tommy Wiseau is and how he had the financial means to bankroll The Room. (One of The Disaster Artist’s many nice moments comes when Sandy (Seth Rogen), Wiseau’s production supervisor on the film, takes a cheque for several thousand dollars into a bank and slides it over to the cashier with a wryly sarcastic sense of the inevitable. To Sandy’s astonishment, the cashier asks what denomination notes he prefers, confiding that the Wiseau account is ‘like a bottomless pit’.) According to legends at the end of The Disaster Artist, Wiseau’s age and background, and the source of his wealth, are unexplained to this day. By retaining his ‘mask of mystery’, Franco and the screenwriters keep Tommy bizarrely entertaining. If they’d chosen to explore who-he-really-was, they’d likely have turned – and reduced – him into a delusional case study. The Disaster Artist can be construed as a parable of the lack of talents, an illustration of various negative characteristics of the film world: vanity, egoism, the power of money, how many people in the industry are desperate for work – any work. Franco doesn’t push these meanings, though. You come out of his film feeling pleasure – both at having been entertained and that this unaccountable piece of movie history has been put on record as a piece of mainstream cinema.
The film covers a five-year period, from the first meeting of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, at a San Francisco acting class, to the premiere of The Room. Tommy’s fearlessness – or shamelessness – on stage impresses the young, timid Greg (played by James Franco’s younger brother Dave) and sets the pattern of their future relationship. They move to Los Angeles to pursue acting careers. Dave Franco is likeable: Greg knows he’s not especially gifted; we root for him as an underdog and stick with him as an outpost of sanity (LA in The Disaster Artist really is La La Land). At first, James Franco’s black-wigged, pale-faced Tommy seems no more than an amusing turn. He looks vaguely vampiric. He speaks in a weirdly involved, put-on voice. It’s amazing how the performance develops. Tommy may be a pathological egotist but he has his generous and humanly needy sides too. Franco, without ever going solemn on us, interprets him with complete sympathy: he makes this man from nowhere, of indeterminate age and accent, not only ridiculous but also touching.
Seth Rogen plays the increasingly exasperated Sandy with fine deadpan wit. The cast also includes Allison Brie (Dave Franco’s wife), Josh Hutcherson and Ari Graynor, as well as some big names in smaller roles – Zac Efron, Melanie Griffith, Sharon Stone, Jacki Weaver. Others – including J J Abrams, Judd Apatow, Bryan Cranston and Adam Scott – make cameo appearances as themselves. The sequences of the filming of The Room are consistently funny and often gross. The premiere supplies a proper and distinctive climax: the audience reaction to what they’re witnessing evolves from stunned, embarrassed silence into helpless laughter and concludes in standing ovation. The closing legends include some remarkable information. Wiseau’s folie de grandeur and bank balance kept The Room running for two more weeks after the premiere, in order to qualify it for Academy Awards consideration. Tommy and Greg still speak daily. As a final treat, while the credits roll, James Franco uses a split screen to juxtapose snippets from his version of The Room with the corresponding bits in Tommy Wiseau’s deathless original.
5 December 2017
