The Disaster Artist
THE DISASTER ARTIST, comedy-biopic, rated R, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles
If you’ve never seen The Room, the 2003 relationship drama written, produced, directed, and starring the enigmatic Tommy Wiseau, you can consider yourself lucky or unlucky, depending on your appreciation for good bad movies or movies so bad they’re good. Reviled by critics and loved by fans, The Room, the story of an investment banker named Johnny (Wiseau) whose fiancée has an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) a month before the wedding, is a passionless tale full of inane dialogue spoken by characters whose motivations are not only contradictory but actually change from second to second. It boasts numerous sex scenes that are awkward and uncomfortably long, subplots that are undeveloped and unresolved, a fake rooftop where much of the action takes place, replete with a green-screened backdrop of San Francisco, and four men — four! — who cannot convincingly toss a football. It’s long been a hit on the midnight movie scene, where fans ironically shout lines back at the screen and egg Johnny on in his final, suicidal moments. It’s even inspired drinking games, wherein fans take a shot every time Johnny says, “Oh. Hi,” or the character Lisa ( Juliette Danielle) says, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But The
Room, despite being a terrible film, has managed to turn a healthy profit, launching its director-star to a sort of ignoble fame. The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s first full-length feature as director, is less about the making of The Room than it is about the friendship of Wiseau, played convincingly by Franco, and Sestero, portrayed by Franco’s real brother Dave. Never mind that there’s a family resemblance. So distinct are their personalities that you soon forget you’re not watching the stars of The Room. Sestero meets Wiseau at a San Francisco acting class, taken in by the much older man’s passion for a craft that neither of them are particularly good at. Wiseau warns Sestero not to ask questions about his personal life. (To this day, no one knows how old Wiseau actually is, where he gets his money from — The Room, which he self-financed, reportedly cost millions — or where he’s from.) A thick, Eastern European accent Bela Lugosi could only envy belies the claim that he’s from the Bayou.
The Disaster Artist succeeds because it refuses to make a mockery of Wiseau, instead painting him as a sympathetic fledgling artist. He and Sestero have an obvious affection for each other, helped on screen, no doubt, by the familiarity the Franco brothers have with each other. The characters challenge and motivate each other, and one can’t help but feel sorry for these struggling actors when their ventures in Hollywood are met only with failure. That’s when Wiseau gets the inspiration to make his own movie, The Room, buying — instead of renting — all his equipment from companies who are amazed that the checks actually clear. His ineptitude, not only as director but as actor, comes through when he repeatedly forgets his lines, even though he wrote them himself. There’s a hilarious moment when, after the umpteenth time shooting a particular scene, he asks in his imperfect English, “What is line?” The entire cast and crew, who’ve heard it dozens of times by now, shout it back to him in unison. Despite inexperience, he fancies himself a modern-day Hitchcock or Kubrick, justifying his sometimes unfair treatment of his actors, like when he body-shames Daniel (Ari Graynor), playing the role of Lisa, in front of the entire cast on what should have been a closed set.
Perhaps The Room wasn’t the instant hit, for all the wrong reasons, that The Disaster Artist makes it out to be, and its reputation only grew over time. But it’s to Wiseau’s credit that he seems to accept his film for what it is, reveling in his popularity even though he’s not the auteur he’d like to be. Franco recreated long stretches of The Room in painstaking detail, and some of the scenes play out in a split-screen comparison before the end credits. If you are eager for more of the real Wiseau and Sestero, they make brief appearances in Franco’s film, and appear together again in the forthcoming, appropriately titled comedy thriller Best F(r)iends, due to hit U.S. theaters in 2018.