Not a “good” bad movie: Revisiting “The Room” and its terrible human failings.
This film is dead on a human level, and horribly depressing.
As a film buff, I believe, quite firmly in fact, that bad movies have a significant place in the history and culture of cinema. I’ve written occasionally about bad films, or films that are strange and inexplicable, or both. Whenever the subject of bad movies comes up, it’s not long before a film called The Room enters the conversation. Released in 2003, Tommy Wiseau’s baffling and incompetent drama has been hailed for more than 20 years now as perhaps the worst picture ever made. Its cult status was enhanced in 2013 with the writing of a memoir by co-star Greg Sestero, called The Disaster Artist, which was itself made into a film in 2017. What I’ve heard often about The Room is what’s said about many bad films, that it’s “so bad it’s good” or “one of the most enjoyably bad movies ever made.” To be totally honest, revisiting it recently, I found it neither. The Room is a terrible film that is not enjoyable, not fun, not silly or redeeming on any level. Indeed, it’s a dreadfully depressing and nihilistic experience, but it’s worth thinking about, if only as a negative example of how truly terrible fiction can so utterly fail to capture the realities of the human condition.
The “plot” is so thin it could be written on toilet paper. (I refuse to honor a movie this bad with a spoiler warning). Johnny (Tommy Wiseau, the writer and director) is a banker who lives in San Francisco and is planning to marry his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle). For reasons never explained, Lisa has decided she’s bored with him and won’t marry him, yet she’s curiously reluctant to break it off. She has an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). After a lot of aimless chatter and surly looks by Lisa, at Johnny’s birthday party things come to a head and he discovers her affair with Mark. Utterly distraught, Johnny puts a gun in his mouth and blows his own head off. That’s it. That’s the entire plot, strung out over 99 interminable, bowel-churning minutes.
