Reasonable Doubt
Room / directed by Lenny Abrahamson
One of the first thoughts I had after watching Room was that it’s remarkable how a not-amazing film can nonetheless be deeply emotionally gripping and involving. I don’t entirely know why I find this confusing or even paradoxical, but I sort of do, and I could even say that these confusions are part of what has for a long time made me cautious about publicizing my thoughts about films I see. At root, it may just be a fear of being wrong, and at a slightly shallower level, about a fear of not knowing what makes art good versus not so good.
One piece of the puzzle that’s obvious from the start: Room is supercharged by a performance by one of its two main actors that seems to outstrip its material. Brie Larson doesn’t miss a beat in her magnetic, sympathetic, and convincing portrayal as Joy, a woman not simply held in captivity in a garden shed for seven years, but who has been impregnated by her captor and has raised a child for the last five years, to boot. Larson’s challenge is to bridge the distance between despairing captive and loving mother, and this she does.
Another piece of the puzzle: the set-up is extreme in various ways - in the circumstances of our heroine and her child, in the deep sympathy we have for them from the start, in our hopes that freedom is at last somewhere on the horizon. I say extreme, but maybe what I want to say is that this set-up is also borderline manipulative; whatever you want to call it, tweaking and playing on our emotions is deeply baked into Room.
At least our introduction to their predicament is subtle enough. It takes a few minutes to figure out for sure that’s something wrong with the setup that Joy and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) find themselves in. They’re in a small, windowless room, with only a skylight for natural light, and seem not able to leave it. Even after we’ve received confirmation that they’re being held captive, we can see how normalized this life has become for Joy; or, more to the point, how much she’s attempted to normalize it for the sake of her son, who’s never been outside these four walls. She tries to keep Jack entertained with what books and toys they have, makes him exercise, and makes sure he doesn’t have any contact with her captor (Sean Bridgers), who enters the room daily through a security code-locked door to deliver food and rape Joy.
Joy tries to arrange their lives so that they can endure the unendurable. It also becomes clear to what an extreme degree Jack’s sense of reality has been shaped by the room; his only literal views of the outside world, apart from the sky above, are via the television, which brings its particularly confusing crockpot of fiction and reality. Tremblay is a well-matched acting partner to Brie’s Joy; his portrayal of Jack feels realistic and non-cloying, a boy whose mother has managed to preserve his innocence against unlikely and terrible circumstances.
Joy seems to have been lulled into accepting the room’s permanent boundaries to her life as she’s tried to make them palatable to her son; it’s when she realizes the spirit-crippling affect that this is having on both of them that she moves forward with a desperate plan to gain them freedom. The sequence that follows is the strongest of the movie, an impressionistic, deeply moving, and nail-biting take on Jack’s first experience of the outside world. Unless you are a zombie or other common form of the undead, your heart will flutter and tears will be jerked.
Room then charts the aftermath of freedom, in the shape of Joy’s clear PTSD and Jack’s difficulties with relating to the overwhelming number of sensations and people he begins to come into contact with. Many sequences in this half of the film are moving and even deeply satisfying, but it’s here too that the limitations of its premise begin to feel more pronounced. There’s a made-for-TV movie quality in the reunions and conflicts that ensue; beyond this, the problem may be that what happens is exactly what we expect and want to happen. There are difficulties, but they are overcome (again, in otherwise satisfying and moving ways). Jack begins to bond with his loving grandparents, played by Joan Allen and Tom McCamus (both excellent), and even makes his first friend, while Joy descends into her own personal depths of long-suppressed pain before clawing her way back to relative good health.
But the insertion of a media interview in which Joy is asked whether she made the right decision in keeping her child with her rather than asking her captor to bring him to a hospital when he was a newborn manages to pose an interesting question in an awkward way, a question which drives much of the drama of the movie’s final act but which is also so arcane as not to be very interesting. Could anyone really blame a woman held captive for keeping her baby as company, even if it meant he’d be a captive, too? The drama of Joy’s guilt ends up feeling forced, even as Brie’s performance remains convincing and vital, and at any rate she is relieved of her guilt by Jack’s apparent evolution to normal boyhood. The movie seems clear that Jack, while facing certain challenges, has had some essential innocence preserved; he might be angry when his mom leaves him for too long, but he’s got no anger let alone rage at what he’s gone through. When he asks that he and his mother visit their former prison at the film’s conclusion, and he comes to realize how small and bare their world had been for so long, it’s puzzlement more than anything else that overcomes him; he gracefully says goodbye, even as we see Joy silently asking herself if she’ll ever be able to let go in the same way.