Thursday, August 18, 2016

Lauren Wilford on Room

The immense accumulation of praise Room received last year from its debut at Toronto to its awards season push left me a little perplexed when I finally saw it earlier this year. I didn't think it was especially great even though I admired its intentions. People ask why film criticism matters, and while there are a myriad of answers, one is quite simply that a really stellar and thoughtful piece can alter your initial reaction to a work and make you see it an entirely new way. This may sound a tad trite, but it's not when you actually sit down and experience the act of reading and how great writing will alter notions and perspectives. That's not to say that one should not always try to come up with their own ideas about something and let criticism simply support those ideas. That, after all, is a chief academic ideal for anyone who's gone through an upper level English college course or beyond. But sometimes you find the criticism before you find your own ideas, and sometimes you have to simply accept and embrace its power.

Since I saw Room I've barely thought about it at all (not exactly fitting given the idea expressed in the previous paragraph, but hey, you can only think about so many movies!) I recently happened upon this essay by Lauren Wilford (a deeply thoughtful writer whose latest piece on Darren Aronofsky's Noah and the nature of literary adaptations is a must read) on the movie and started to read it and found it to be extremely enlightening, particularly in its analysis of Brie Larson's character. I found the performance to be good, but the character to be underwhelming as in: there's so much that could be done with this character but the film doesn't seem very interested in doing that. In retrospect, perhaps I didn't wrestle with this film enough. Wilford writes: 
Ma is a victim of affliction. Weil stresses that such a condition cannot be shared. It is “specific, irreducible to any other thing, like sounds we cannot explain at all to a deaf-mute.” When Ma decides to tell Jack part of the truth of their situation in Room, she must try to explain the unexplainable — about how there’s a whole real world outside, with room for all the cats and dogs — but for some things, he still has to stay in the wardrobe. Some days inside Room, Ma would have a “gone day.” We see Ma in bed, submerged in sorrow, in a montage of shots showing how Jack passes the time when she is away. There is a shot in the latter half of the film where Jack tries to follow a distraught Ma, but she slams the bathroom door behind her, shutting him out of her suffering. The camera stays outside the bathroom. It is an echo of the wardrobe door that Ma gently shut on Jack the start of the film. There are places that he cannot go. There are places that we cannot go.

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