On The Disaster Artist

At this point, there’s been more than enough said about The Room’s awfulness. Everyone who’s seen Tommy Wiseau’s magnum opus has taken it upon themselves to show it to an unsuspecting group of friends and watch their faces run the gamut from confusion to bewilderment to existential dread to uncontrollable laughter. While never attaining mainstream success, the film and its enigmatic director have settled comfortably into a cult status that has endured for years thanks to its enthusiastic fanbase. Admittedly, this enthusiasm had run its course for me a long time ago but even so, it caught my attention when Wiseau began appearing on late-night shows to help promote James Franco’s The Disaster Artist. The movie would chronicle The Room’s chaotic production as well as Wiseau’s friendship with Greg Sestero, who was behind the autobiography the movie was based on.

The book, which Sestero co-wrote with Tom Bissel, is a pretty enjoyable read that owes a lot more thematically to Sunset Boulevard than to Ed Wood, capturing the brutal struggle of forcing one’s way into Hollywood’s star-churning machine and the crushing blows of failure that come with it. It’s written with an honesty that should hit close to home for anyone who ever wanted to pursue an artistic career. At the heart of it all is Sestero’s relationship with Wiseau. Sestero pokes fun at his eccentricities while empathizing with his loneliness, but the most affecting moments are when we are allowed to see Wiseau at his most repugnant. Jealous, manipulative, self-victimizing, bitter, and when he steps into the role of director, an outrageously inept egomaniac.

He is not framed this way to be villainized, but to recontextualize how we see The Room. Once you manage to look past the nonsensical dialogue, the laughable set design, and Wiseau’s borderline-extra-terrestrial screen presence, you’ll find a sincere plea from a filmmaker to see him the way he sees himself - as a tragic romantic hero. Wiseau was driven by his unshakeable belief that the people in his life, Hollywood – the whole world - had done him wrong and demonstrates his hurt by ending the film with his character Johnny blowing his brains out, and his traitorous friends weeping over his blood-splattered corpse. It is phenomenally stupid, but it betrays a candid insight into how Wiseau views people and relationships. “If a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live,” Johnny muses. It’s simplistic, naïve, and so blindingly earnest that you almost believe it.

It’s important to bear all this in mind to understand all the ways in which The Disaster Artist is a failure. What we have here is a movie that more of less presents a streamlined take on the book's events with none of the thornier elements that it made it interesting. Greg Sestero (played by Dave Franco) encounters Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) in an acting class. Greg feels a pull towards Tommy as he watches him butcher a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. What Tommy lacks in talent he makes up for with fearlessness and a reckless self-confidence that Greg desperately covets. The two friends make a pact to support each other’s acting dreams, but while Greg is able to score auditions and an agent, Tommy is rejected at every turn. One producer cruelly tells him that he will never succeed in a million years, which is what pushes him to write, direct and star in his own movie, The Room. What follows is the notoriously disastrous production that among other things, had an actress passing out due to lack of air conditioning, Tommy infuriating his cast and crew by constantly forgetting his lines, humiliating the female lead, and instigating fights with the crew members. Tensions also rise between Tommy and Greg as the production, as well as Tommy’s callous behavior, threatens to break them apart. Miraculously, The Room finally gets made, and the rest is history.

James Franco's Tommy Wiseau is more impression than performance, with little trace of a well-defined character behind the wig and makeup. Being his brother of course means he has a natural chemistry with Dave Franco, who makes the best out of a relatively undemanding role. But even a capable cast can only do so much with a script that has a merely superficial interest in its subjects. Scenes like when Greg’s mother tries to talk him out of acting feel like they exist out of obligation. It rushes from scene to scene when it should be taking its time to explore the widening fissures in Tommy and Greg’s friendship. It gestures towards Tommy’s nastier impulses when it should be interrogating them. The only time this movie bothers to examine the ways in which Tommy’s real-life experiences mirror and influence the story in The Room, it’s given the most surface-level reading imaginable. Greg and the other actors casually ponder over lunch who the inspirations behind the characters were, with no deeper insight to add. You get the feeling that the writers were just as incurious.

Further compounding these issues is how few successful jokes this film is able to mine out of Franco’s performance and the various on-set shenanigans. A scene when Tommy and Greg creep on the auditioning women is not only unfunny, but, rings especially sinister given the allegations of sexual harassment made against Franco. There isn’t much creativity in the form either. The loose handheld style is perfectly serviceable, but there were plenty of missed opportunities where The Room’s amateurish staging and editing could’ve been used for visual gags. The movie even ends with a montage of the cast painstakingly recreating scenes from The Room, but when it comes across as imitation for imitation’s sake, who even cares?

While all The Disaster Artist wants to be is an ostensibly entertaining movie that also introduces a singular work of outsider art to a wider audience, it’s hard not to think about what it could’ve been in more thoughtful hands. Tommy Wiseau was rejected by Hollywood, so he made a name for himself in the fringes of cult cinema. The Room was meant to be taken seriously, but after audiences ridiculed it, Wiseau insisted that it was a comedy, and he was in on the joke all along. There is something tragic about his rise to success as a man who will only be accepted as a walking meme. And there is definitely something cynical about a middling Hollywood director trying to capitalize on that meme’s popularity. The same could be said of Sestero’s book but at least it refused to simplify Wiseau’s flaws. Instead, it dwelled in them and gave The Room meaning and poignancy. Read about Wiseau’s anxieties about his age and loneliness, and suddenly those nonsensical scenes of tuxedo football-throwing aren’t as funny anymore. Franco’s movie is too timid to go that far, and sometimes feels deliberately calculated to avoid challenging Wiseau’s public persona as a loveable goofball. This was probably to be expected, since Wiseau himself was involved in The Disaster Artist and didn’t take too kindly to the book’s portrayal of him. The movie ends up in a similar pitfall with a lot of other biopics, which tend to be artistically compromised when the subject is still alive and has a hand in what’s being said about them. And so, it smooths over Wiseau's messier contradictions for an easily digestible story with a feel-good message. What a waste.