‘THE DISASTER ARTIST’ IS A HOOT, IN A GOOD WAY
“The Disaster Artist,” James Franco’s charming love letter to one of the most fabulously awful movies ever, earns “Hi Marks,” indeed.
Based on Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s 2013 nonfiction book of the same name, “The Disaster Artist” serves up a good-natured slice of aged cheese. It tells the story behind eccentric filmmaker Tommy Wiseau’s baffling, so-bad-it’sawesome masterpiece, “The Room.”
Fans of the 2003 cult film will delight in re-creations of scenes from a film that definitely marched to the beat of its own drummer. The original featured Mr. Wiseau ( who also wrote and directed) starring as Johnny, a banker as equally at ease disarming a drug hood as he is engaging in lighthearted boudoir pillow fights with his love, Lisa, and their neighbor, Denny, a 15-year-old boy.
If that makes no sense, well, that’s just “The Room.”
To this day, Mr. Wiseau remains a man of mystery. No one knows where he came from (somewhere in Europe?) Or what that accent is (French? Austrian?) Or how he was able to afford to self-produce a $6 million film.
This much is known: the man was passionate about becoming an actor, a film auteur.
In “The Disaster Artist,” Mr. Franco directs and also stars as Tommy. His mimicry is spot on. He has the look down pat: long, tangled hair, with a certain tilt of his head to give the impression he’s looking down his nose at people.
More important, he has captured Mr. Wiseau’s odd speech patterns, all mumbles and dropped articles and pronunciations such as SEAR-yus for serious.
The tale begins in 1998, with Tommy powerfully over-emoting a scene in a San Francisco acting class. Yet he is not without his admirers; another in the class, Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) is struck by his fearlessness.
They become scene partners, then friends. They move to Los Angeles to try their luck with acting and modeling. To Tommy’s way of thinking, making his own movie, directing and starring in it himself will be the path to stardom.
Mr. Sestero played Mark, Johnny’s best friend and a completely inexplicable part of a love triangle with Lisa. In “The Disaster Artist,” Dave Franco doesn’t quite pull off the embodiment of the real Greg, but he and everyone else certainly seem to be having a good time.
“The Room” became a huge guilty pleasure in the Los Angeles comedy scene. In Hollywood, Mr. Wiseau rented a billboard with his heavy-lidded face on it from 2003-2008.
Actors such as Paul Rudd, Will Arnett and David Cross became obsessed with “The Room” after art houses began showing the movie late at night. Many of its celebrity fans, such as Seth Rogen (who also served as a producer and plays a script supervisor), Kristen Bell, Judd Apatow, Paul Scheer, Alison Brie and Josh Hutcherson, populate “The Disaster Artist.”
The vast majority of a preview screening audience clearly knew “The Room,” and laughed in anticipation of certain lines. (Pity the poor viewer who walks in, having never seen it. Of course, repeated viewings still don’t explain the dropped plot points — Lisa’s mother states she has cancer and it’s never again brought up — or why there are young men in tuxedos tossing around a football).
In “The Disaster Artist,” what was to be a 40-day shoot stretched on and on, as Tommy showed up late, demanded changes to the script, fired and rehired actors and crew. It’s clear the real Mr. Wiseau was in over his head, and that — despite his revised version of events — his inexplicable choices were not made ironically.
In recreating one famous scene, Johnny listens to Mark tell a story with a sad ending, and in shot after shot, he reacts by chuckling heartily. Then there is the infamous homage to James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” — Johnny screams “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”
And also this: according to “The Disaster Artist,” Mr. Wiseau kept forgetting his lines for a dramatic rooftop scene. When he finally got it right, the tension was ruined with the addition of a scripted, causual line, “Oh, hi Mark.”
Was that distraction left in “The Room”? Of course it was.