I don't go out of my way to watch bad movies. I used to. I mean, like every teenage boys I once wanted to watch every B movie ever made, but I eventually found out it was a futile exercise once clichés started repeating themselves and the movies started sounding like bad spinoffs of one another. I guess this is why it took me 12 years to finally sit down in front of THE ROOM. You know what they say though: idle hands are the devil's playground, so all it took was a night off and a conversation with Film Colossus' Chris Lambert to set me off. Bad movies often blur together, but when you're watching something special, something transcendent, there's nothing quite like it. In fact, I'm pretty sure there will nothing quite like THE ROOM for the next hundred years.
Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is the world's nicest investment banker. He lives a happy, uncomplicated life in San Francisco with his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and his friends. The only problem in his seemingly perfect existence is that Lisa's secretly a bipolar basket case who grew bored of their lengthy and passionate lovemaking sessions, and that she's not banging her friend Mark (Greg Sestero) because she can (and inexplicably develops feeling for him about halfway through). Johnny and Lisa are supposed to get married the following month, but Lisa's growing restlessness about their relationship is about to cost them everything. By that, I mean more than their relationship or their belief in love. The space-time continuity of their universe, for starters.
I don't ever know where to start. It would be foolish to judge THE ROOM by the same standards used to judge normal movies, because it's not a movie you're supposed to watch for the same reasons. Take my favourite character in THE ROOM, for example. He's a pre-adolescent boy named Denny (Philip Haldiman) and he has no business being a character in this movie, except to make protagonist Johnny look good. He has zero useful scenes in the storyline, yet somehow it's hilarious. Denny doesn't feel like a real person at any moment. Even when he's on screen, he comes off as something too pure, too neat. The ideal son Johnny didn't have yet.
In one of my favorite scenes, Denny's threatened by a thug with a firearm about an obscure drug debt, only to be rescued by Johnny and Mark. Not only Denny's drug habit is never discussed past this scene, but Denny himself disappears for a long stretch of the movie afterwards. That scene's a clumsy and insecure attempt to create a capital of sympathy for Johnny, so that viewers can identify him as a pure soul. In the inner logic of THE ROOM, that scene works beautifully, because not only it serves as an interlude for the silly romantic drama, but the confusing manner it is brought up makes it feel like Johnny's just inventing a story about how much of a white knight he is and Johnny's not even supposed to be the narrator here.
Sure, Tommy Wiseau. Denny looks like the type of kid who could've contracted a sizeable drug debt. He doesn't look too young or too neat at all for that.
My other favorite aspect of THE ROOM is the long, winded and hilarious sex scenes. They never seem to end and both men bedding Lisa each have their respective theme song, like pro wrestlers. I think Lisa get nailed like, four times in a 100 minutes movie. Tommy Wiseau takes a considerable chunk of his movie to makes Lisa come off as a soulless whore, but every sex scene is sultry, steaming, shot in Johnny's ridiculous, Harlequin fantasy of a bedroom with booming R&B music in the background. The conflicting desires of Tommy Wiseau as a director, a storyteller and a narrator are never clearer and more entertaining than in the multiple and awkwardly long sex scenes of THE ROOM. Wiseau's efforts to steer the viewers towards his conclusions are a telltale sign of a storyteller not having any faith in his narrative voice, but his conclusions change so much over the movie, it's such a sport to keep up with them that it works.
I wouldn't say THE ROOM is a bad movie. That's right, please keep reading if you want to understand that statement. Bad movies are generic, arrogant and derivative. THE ROOM is what would happen if we let an insane person direct a movie. It's a daytime soap opera seen through the eyes of an unmedicated bipolar paranoid asshole. Seeing it for the first time is also a controlled experience in suffering some kind of psychological disorder. There will never be another movie like THE ROOM unless is falls in cinema oblivion, which is less and less probable given the internet and the respect it gained as a cult movie over the last decade. Any attempt to create something similar, even from Tommy Wiseau, would come off as obvious and manipulative. It's an earnest irregularity in our space-time continuum. I'm sure a parallel dimension collapsed when it premiered. THE ROOM is the little movie that should have never been, but we should be glad that we have it.