Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Runtime: 118 minutes
Rooting an entire movie in the perspective of a 5 year old is one hell of a risk, which is why director Lenny Abrahamson and his collaborators deserve countless hosannas. Last appearing with the oddball music dramedy Frank, Abrahamson has taken a gigantic leap forward with Room, working off of Emma Donoghue's adaptation of her own novel. Both a tense psychological drama and a moving mother/son, Room finds Abrahamson graduating to a whole new level as a director.
Like most kids, 5 year old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) loves when his birthday rolls around. He eats cake, gets extra attention from his mom, and gets to feel like the center of the universe. But the center of Jack's universe is terrifyingly small. All of his life, Ma (Brie Larson) has told him that Room - a soundproofed shack with only a skylight for light - is the entire world. Outside of Room is space, and then beyond that is heaven. Dogs and cats and other people, the ones the pair see on their TV, don't really exist. Ma's behavior would sound disturbing and cult-ish were it not for the fact that her placement in Room was anything but voluntary. Her lessons about the worlds outside of Room may be lies, but they are lies told out of love, in order to keep the awful truth at bay. There isn't much in Room, but at least mother and son have each other while cramped inside their four walls.
Even with a first half set almost entirely in a single space, Abrahamson shows remarkable dexterity behind the camera. Working with cinematographer Danny Cohen, he turns Room into a visually dynamic space. The camera moves and swings, and at times captures space at angles that make everything appear much bigger. The Room may not be big to us (or to Ma), but it's literally the entire world to Jacob, and Abrahamson and Cohen do a striking job of conveying this notion. The grim reality remains at the fringes, but is only palpable when Ma is significantly present in a shot.
Young Mr. Tremblay is effortlessly believable in his role, neither grating nor overly coached. He never hits a false note, and Abrahamson ought to be commended for guiding the young actor through some tricky material. Having the film so strictly grounded in his mindset pays off in spades. Jack is allowed to be both our window into Room's world, while also functioning as a protagonist with agency. W.C. Fields is famously quoted as saying, "Never work with children or animals," but Tremblay makes a compelling case as evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, Larson adds another wrenching performance to her resume as Ma. She plays the character's complexities with great restraint, keeping one on edge as to what her next move will be. Ma loves Jack, but she's also an adult who has had her life irrevocably altered, even if a day comes when she can escape from Room. Despite a few disappearances during the story, Room is just as much about Ma's shattered psyche as it is about Jack's experiences with the world (both the one he knows, and beyond). Room is about emotional imprisonment, but it spends just as much time dealing with recovery from trauma, which is hardly an easy journey.
Despite the eventual appearance of the outside world, Room remains anchored in Tremblay and Larson's beautiful performances. Under Abrahamson's watch, their story never gets lost even as the scope of the narrative widens. Room puts the bonds of mother and child through the wringer, but always with tasteful distance. Abrahamson and Donoghue present some harsh realities and harsh questions, but their concern for their characters mirrors Ma's treatment Jack: sometimes it's abrasive, but it ultimately comes from a place of profoundly moving love that refuses to be shaken.
Grade: A-
Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Runtime: 95 minutes
Michael Fassbender's mask-wearing singer/composer may be the face (and title) of Lenny Abrahamson's Frank, but the film's story belongs to someone else. That someone is Jon Burroughs, played by fellow Irishman Domhnall Gleeson (son of Calvary star Brendan Gleeson). Though Gleeson is our entryway into Frank's world of off-kilter, underground musician, he emerges as the most fully-formed character. He is more than an audience surrogate, which is a huge plus considering the slightly cartoonish characterizations of everyone else who appears on screen in this mostly winning dark comedy.
When we first meet Jon, he's doing his best to compose a song based on what he sees around him, yet nothing is coming together. There is no magical moment of inspiration that ever takes place throughout the rest of Abrahamson's film, which further grounds the story's stakes in the real world, despite the broad strokes used in defining many of the characters. This is no Behind the Music/rags to riches story. Like last year's excellent Inside Llewyn Davis, it's a story of simply trying to get by, in hopes that something great will be not too far off.
So even though Jon is taken with Frank's very alternative take on indie rock, he understands that they have a lot of work to do to finish a first album. Secluded away in the Irish countryside, the young man starts to document the band's progress through every tedious step (it takes almost a year before proper recording even commences). Along the way, he has to contend with the band's financial struggles, along with resistance from a duo of French band mates and the stand-offish Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
And then there's Frank himself, who's his own riddle wrapped up in a mystery (etc...). No one has seen Frank without the bulbous fake head at all, and no one has any idea what the reason for wearing the piece might be. Still, even with his expressive face concealed, Fassbender lends a surprisingly playful air to this bizarro band leader. He is an extreme example of the tortured artist that no one truly understands, yet Fassbender keeps him in check, never making him too broad or "out there" to the point where he loses his humanity. Despite the odd looking head-gear, Frank, along with Jon, comes off as a believable presence.
Unfortunately, this isn't true at all for the rest of the band's members. Gyllenhaal has a great deal of fun with her prickly role, but the script struggles to push past her surface behaviors. More often than not, she's used to punctuate a moment with dour sarcasm, leaving her little to do for herself. The mumbly French duo are given even less to work with.
Thankfully, Gleeson holds the film together quite nicely, even as Frank starts to drag its feet in the final act. The writing often seems too caught up in the eccentricities of given moments, and in doing so, forget to really sharpen the arcs of its major players. Gleeson and Fassbender, however, at least have material with some semblance of substance to work with, even as they're forced to make due with a wobbly foundation.
So even though the majority of Frank works, it's still a film that lacks strong focus. The final scene is both charming and bleak, an unusual combination that somehow works. Yet afterwards, the film's intentions seem a bit muddled. There are a number of big, rich angles touched on, yet it's hard to say which one the film really put as its number one priority. Despite some nice performances and a nicely honed, dark sense of humor, Frank often feels more like a novel bit of eccentricity, rather than a fully-formed work. Like Frank's band, Abrahamson's film is clearly onto something, but it's desperately in need of a great deal of fine-tuning.
Grade: B-
