It’s a small, small world
Lenny Abrahamson’s very human drama starts out creepily enough, with a young mother (Joy, played by Brie Larson) apparently confined to a very small space with her longhaired child whom she calls “Jack.” It’s Jack’s birthday, and Joy struggles to make him a cake from a limited supply of ingredients. “Where are the candles?” he complains. There are no candles. So how can it be a birthday cake, Jack wants to know? Joy, it turns out, has been in the unhappy position of explaining the world to a child who has never glimpsed its existence beyond four walls and a ceiling. She invents terms and explanations to make it bearable and relatable for Jack. Although there is a TV set in the small room, its cartoons and news reports and TV dramas all blur together as a singular reality confined to a tiny box — just as Joy and Jack’s reality is confined to a box.
Based loosely on a true story of human imprisonment (in which a confined Austrian woman gave birth to and raised her son in a basement), Room is like no other Oscar contender this year. First of all, it’s Room, not The Room. It’s important that the article “The” not be used because for five-year-old Jack (played by the remarkable Jacob Tremblay), there is no other world than the 10’ x8’x 12’ garden shed in which he’s been imprisoned with his mother for seven years; there’s only the world that he calls “Room.”
Abrahamson’s unfolding drama soon makes it clear how circumstances have brought Joy and Jack to this confined space. And it’s a reality that has occurred in several bizarre real-life cases: a male figure overpowers a woman and locks her up for years; she becomes a sex slave, a prisoner, a subjugate. He wields the power and authority to bring her food and withhold beatings, or to demand sexual favors. In 2008, a man in Austria was arrested for keeping his own daughter prisoner in an underground cellar for 24 years; he had seven kids with her. She eventually found a way to escape. Joseph Fritzl, the father, is now confined to a very small space (the novel Room was inspired by this case).
Room has a two-part structure. In the second half, we learn how difficult it is to be set free. Jack’s entire life was spent examining a world made up of superlative nouns: “spoon,” “carpet,” “bed,” “wardrobe.” No other items existed in his consciousness to compare them to (hence the absence of “the”).
He has an imaginary dog, because he’s never seen a real one. (Though when he tries to befriend a rat by feeding it bits of oatmeal, his mother quickly ends the relationship with a thrown shoe.)
Through Jack’s exceptional voiceover, we learn how it is to be raised in captivity, a captivity that you’re not even aware of. The wonder of encountering the “real” world out there is nearly overwhelming, for both son and mother.
There are pulse-pounding moments in Room, but while a lesser film would have turned the captor into a simplistic monster, Abrahamson’s human-scale story has other things in mind to explore. Part of Room’s secret is showing us how much baggage we carry along with us as adults. You’d think the harder task would be for a kid raised in a room to understand a world he never knew existed; you’d think it would literally tear his world apart. But children, we learn, are very resilient. They cope more easily because they have fewer attachments to the past and to history. Adults have a harder time, because they’re always drawn into a past freighted with guilt, doubt, regret, and fear.
Larson here is incredible, and deserves the nomination as a young mother who copes with raising a child she gave birth to in a cell. We are initially confused: Is Jack a girl with a boy’s name? Or a boy with long hair? Joy’s choices — breastfeeding him up until he’s five, not cutting his hair — turn out to be the coping mechanisms of a young mother living in fear, living in isolation. But from her perspective, the huge gap between how she copes and how the real “world” ultimately views (and judges) her prove to be almost fatal. She nearly falls into that gap.
Joan Allen and Bill Macy lend their acting chops as the supportive and non-supportive parents of Joy, respectively. They hold opposing viewpoints on a mother’s responsibility to her son. (An obnoxious TV interviewer also takes on the devil’s advocate role — one we’re forced to adopt as well, asking ourselves questions like, “Why didn’t neighbors notice stove smoke rising from a backyard shed for years on end? Why didn’t they hear her daily screams for help? Why didn’t they escape through that overhead skylight?”) Newcomer Larson shows us a woman who feels even more caged after she’s set free.
But it’s Tremblay who’s the biggest revelation. This kid — all of nine years old — holds the film together, and he’s in nearly every frame. It’s his wide-eyed narrative that brings us into the world of a child radically set free. This kind of thing could be really cloying in the hands of, say, Spielberg or Ron Howard; but minus the sentiment, and fraught with all the dangers along the way, it feels like an honest rebirth.
Watching ‘Room,’ we wonder: Why didn’t neighbors notice stove smoke rising from a backyard shed? Why didn’t they hear her screams for help? Why didn’t they escape through that overhead skylight?