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The Disaster Artist

5/1/2018

3 Comments

 

B-
​2.50

A fictionalized retelling of the production of the worst movie ever made.

Directed by James Franco
Starring James Franco, Dave Franco, and Alison Brie
​Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
​The Room is a singular work of filmmaking, in that no other person could make it but Tommy Wiseau at this one exact moment in time.  As dreadful as it is, The Room does make a person consider what a good film even is.  Is it more fun and entertaining to watch The Room than the average mildly entertaining, competent movie?  I would say 100%, yes.  It binds people together in ritual and shared experience.  It’s an original vision powered by sheer will and a jeans fortune, or something, that gives the viewer a significant look into the creator’s head.  I’ve read and listened to some overheated praise for The Room, and while its most fervent adherents make some good points about art and the criteria of ‘good,’ what cannot be argued about is how despicably misogynist and nakedly narcissistic the actual movie is.  If Wiseau put so much of himself into the film, the picture that comes out of it is one of a delusional man who hates women, who has no talent for self-inspection, who’s so prideful that he can’t ask for help when he’s painfully outmatched.  The pleasure I take from The Room is gleeful derision that someone so obviously awful could fail so spectacularly.  He is not admirable.  James Franco’s The Disaster Artist disagrees, and in a particularly irritating way.  It sees the value in Tommy’s effort even if what it was used for is an execrable catastrophe worthy of all the derision it receives, and more.

Beginning with well-known actors fawning all over The Room for its weird anti-genius, The Disaster Artist is frontloading Tommy as a rebel instead of a nutcase.  We’re first introduced to Franco’s portrayal of him in an acting class that isn’t just overacted, it’s the equivalent of a child throwing a tantrum (and true to their real life meeting).  Those interviews would have this scene play as an eccentric man making a unique choice, but if the choice is so, so wrong, what value is the person who made it?  Incredibly, but also true, young Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) confuses shamelessness with confidence and wants to work with Tommy, who, in an alternate reality, turned Greg into his sex slave and disappeared into the Belarussian steppes.  Tommy, with his unplacable accent and mysterious past and endless well of money, keeps offering Greg necessities that an aspiring actor can’t really turn down, and despite their decades-long age gap, they move in together as wannabe thespians in Tommy’s second apartment in a major city.  Greg experiences minimal success, but the oblivious Tommy gets even less, and they come to the conclusion that if they want to really work in LA, they’ll have to create.
​
The film splits evenly between this prologue and the production of The Room, which is shown to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions from the start.  The film bubbles over with details so absurd that they must be true.  Tommy has to have his own, worse bathroom separate from the regular bathrooms.  Two camera formats because shut up, that’s why.  Sets built instead of locations used because this is a real Hollywood movie, dammit.  Tommy laughs when told a chilling story of a woman being beaten to death because human behavior.  Franco and writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber show all the many ways that Tommy is a horrible boss, to say nothing of his nonexistent directing and acting skills.  He’s a Trumpian figure who demands loyalty without earning it, who revels in how little he knows and dares his underlings to call him on it, who does everything for the sake of his own vanity.  That kind of character at the center makes the Disaster Artist a fitting film for this moment of sneering at expertise, minimal self-reflection, and fame being its own reward.

Appropriately for how it’s cast, The Disaster Artist is most concerned with the relationship between the two surrogate brothers of Tommy and Greg.  James is doing a fine impression, Dave is appropriately earnest and good-natured, and they have a lived-in chemistry with each other.  However, the friendship itself is built on such flimsy ground.  The big blow-up between them is both long overdue and not intense enough.  Tommy is as much of a mystery in the film as he is in real life, outside of his neediness and pathetic loneliness.  Pathos can’t be had without honesty, and Tommy’s not an honest person.  Greg is written as too dumb to function.  He’s nowhere near as despicable as Tommy, but his stupidity makes it difficult to like him.  From the right angle, it’s reasonable that Greg would go with this insane person to a new city and live in his apartment.  There’s no way he could read the script for The Room and praise it.  Dave plays that reaction as earnest, and it’s just impossible.  This moment, where he doesn’t even have notes, is a scarlet letter upon him that I don’t think the character recovers from and therefore robs the film of any investment in the Tommy and Greg pairing.

Around the Francos are a deep ensemble of most of the working comic actors in LA, and such a group can’t really miss.  The best part of the Disaster Artist is the cast’s growing exasperation with him, led by Seth Rogen’s Sandy Schklair.  His snarky asides have a 100% hit rate, while Paul Scheer’s Raphael Smadja gets to unload on Tommy in righteous fury.  Ari Graynor instills a surprising amount of pathos in her performance as the actor who plays Lisa, a woman barely keeping it together as she realizes that no, this isn’t going to be her big break after all.   Jason Mantzoukas and Hannibal Burress are great as the shocked proprietors of an equipment rental facility, one of many who might feel bad swindling anyone other than Tommy.  Alison Brie, as Greg’s girlfriend, is treated eminently fair, avoiding the easy territory of scold.  Zac Efron is really going for it as Chris R, and every appearance of Josh Hutcherson as Denny gets a laugh.  All the crazy anecdotes from Greg’s titular book, combined with this cast, would easily make an interesting film, but, possibly due to the necessities of getting rights, Tommy has to have some kind of hero moment or redemption and the film is the worse for it.

At the actual premiere of The Room, per Greg himself, people walked out at the first sign of Tommy’s weathered ass pounding into poor Lisa’s belly button, and the whole thing was tremendous failure.  The Disaster Artist, so keen on reproducing unique details when there are laughs to be had, wants to leave the viewer with a good feeling, so the film gets a standing ovation and Tommy gets to immediately rebrand his film as a comedy and everything’s great.  He might be a vulture who insists that The Room is as bad as it is as a funny joke, but if that was the case, he’d have made something else of equal value by now.  To repeat, there’s pleasure to be had from The Room because it’s pleasurable to watch someone deserving of failure have it dropped on his doorstep.  The Disaster Artist, made by people at the top of their careers, wants everyone to know that your dreams are possible if you have a huge supply of money and don’t care about precedent or experience or hard-won knowledge and just fart something terrible out there.  Who cares about quality when there’s passion?  That is a stance I am diametrically opposed to, and to see it used in connection with Tommy Wiseau of all people is offensive to me.  The Disaster Artist makes me laugh and seethe in equal measure.  This film definitely has cancer.  C-
3 Comments
Cooker
5/1/2018 03:51:53 pm

I highly advise reading the book before seeing the movie.

I just have to comment on this sentence from the initial review, "Who cares about quality when there’s passion?" This describes any and/or all of my Harry Potter spoofs. Haha

Loved the book and the film; it was actually my favorite film of 2017 (please note that I don't make it to the theater often).

A. Oh, hi, Denny and/or Mark.

Reply
Shane
5/14/2018 03:17:28 pm

A must-see movie for any fans of The Room. However, the movie makes the mistake of fawning over Tommy Wisau, a person clearly not worthy of adulation outside of how hard he worked. Working hard is admirable, but it doesn't mean the work translates into something great.

For example, no one gives a shit about a house painter who works his ass of in the sun but got the colors all wrong and used indoor paint. The end result is a bad paint job. Maybe the homeowner takes a picture and laughs about it in the future, but the painter can't all of the sudden start saying the bad paint job was intentional and he worked hard to do it that way because the world needs more laughter.

This movie actually tries to defend this as a higher-thinking work of art. As if Franco needs to validate his feelings of affection for the movie or else he's a fraud as an artist himself. But The Room is a bad paint. It's a 2 hour pratfall that appeals to our most base emotions. That was not the intention of the movie and if it was, Tommy Wissau has proven through his failed Tv shows that he is no Tim and Eric.

The Disaster Artist is defending the bad paint job and telling us maybe we shouldn't care so much what the house looks like. We should appreciate the work put in. Even worse, it tells us that there's something special about the painter. His errors aren't errors, but instead the painter is a master artist. Even worse, the film ends up creating a new reality for the painter. It distorts the truth and acts as if people were in on the joke while the painter was painting.

But it's a lie. And it takes away from some great performances and an alluring story. It's a story that never needed lipstick. Even the mysterious aspects of the story are satisfying because you'll always wonder how it was made. Sometime you don't need to see all of what Oz has behind the curtain. Just the man is enough.

C

Reply
Lane
5/19/2018 02:59:49 pm

I liked this movie better than our reviewers did. For one, this probably has to do with my love of James Franco. I know, I know…I’m the only person in the world that actually likes James Franco as an actor and creator. It’s just that I have this feeling—a deep unfounded feeling with nothing to base it on except what I’ve read on the internet and seen on the screen—that Franco is actually outsmarting us all. He’s playing the part of “Hollywood” actor and all that comes with it—wealth, celebrity, status, sexual obscurity—while simultaneously living into it, blurring his own identities and self-understandings. I mean, was anyone sure he was actually straight until the #MeToo accusations started before the Oscars? Is anyone still sure? I have this picture in my mind of Franco, lying on his deathbed, and saying the name of his beloved childhood toy, revealing that this had been a ruse all along, and then winking and dying and we’re still not sure.

That’s why I think the mistake that our intrepid reviewers make in their reviews of this film is, like Franco the man and myth, they are mistaking source material for Hollywood patina. What I feel like our reviewers want “The Disaster Artist” to be is something closer to documentary, and that’s not what this film aims to do, nor is it what it should be doing. We shouldn’t be judging this film against “Boogie Nights,” a film about filmmaking and performers wising up to reality; we should be judging it against “Edward Scissorhands”—a film about weirdos.

I’ll grant that this film is no PTA or Tim Burton joint, and not even close. In fact, a better choice to tell the story of Tommy and Greg might have been to make Hollywood a much weirder, grittier, and less desirable place. More Hollywood Blvd. and less Hollywood Hills. The film hinges on the classic tension of stardom and the difficulty of attaining it. A better film would have asked the question of why you would want that anyway. That film isn’t as marketable, though, and maybe Franco himself just hasn’t developed as a filmmaker enough to ask that question, but I have to think he’s getting close. His acting in the film is top notch and I maintain that I can still feel sad that he did stupid things with and to women and it cost him an Oscar nod, because this role deserved it.

But maybe Franco was ahead of his time here. This film wasn’t supposed to tell a true story—if it was, yes it fails. It sought to tell a redemption story, and it’s a good redemption story, even if flawed and untrue. I’m grading the film on its own turf. Maybe someone down the road will make a movie about Franco’s own redemption, and, hopefully that one will be true.

Grade: B+

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