Each year, there is at least one movie that I think I will hate and that I end up loving. Some years, it is much easier to pinpoint that movie than in other years. Not in 2017. Based on the trailers and the movie’s premise, I thought I would hate James Franco’s (Child of God, As I Lay Dying) The Disaster Artist. I will say that I knew nothing about Tommy Wiseau or the cult status of his movie The Room. However, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by this movie’s effectiveness. This movie had quite a bit of Oscar buzz heading into awards season. It netted Franco a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Unfortunately (for him), he was hit up with some sexual misconduct claims right around this time, and it very well could have cost him a nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role. This was the sixth-best performance of the year. As mentioned in previous posts, I would have gone with four nominated, minus Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel Esq.), and replaced him with Jake Gyllenhaal (Stronger). After seeing this movie, I would have knocked Washington’s performance down to seventh and inserted Franco’s performance as the best not to be recognized with a nomination. His performance was very good. The movie would still have been good had he directed it and cast someone else as the lead, but casting himself was the right call.
I thought this movie would fall somewhere between a spoof of something that I wasn’t aware of and a complete “disaster – his goofy-looking character with his goofy voice. But I kept hearing comparisons of this movie to Ed Wood, another movie that I thought I would immensely dislike but ended up enjoying. So, like most movies I watch at home, I gave it 20 minutes to grab my attention. If it doesn’t capture me by 20 minutes, I won’t exactly turn it off, but I’ll stop giving it my attention. I truly expected that to happen with The Disaster Artist. The film begins with some real-life celebrities talking about an incomparable movie like nothing they’d witnessed on screen before. It was Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic The Room (think a poor man’s Rocky Horror Picture Show minus the music). We then go to the first scene of the actual movie. In 1998, in San Francisco, Greg Sestero (Dave Franco – Neighbors, Now You See Me) was in acting class, performing a scene for his instructor (Melanie Griffith – Working Girl, Shining Through). She criticizes him and his acting partner for not being fearless enough to show the class who they are.
We then meet Tommy (Franco), an aspiring actor who does the over-the-top “Stella” scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. While the rest of the class (and us, the movie audience, who are now prepared for things to come) are embarrassed for Tommy, Greg admires his fearlessness. The two quickly become friends, eventually becoming roommates in Tommy’s apartment in Los Angeles. As an aside, Tommy’s accent is often challenging to understand. When they ask where he got it from, he always says New Orleans. Also, we don’t know how he got all of the money he has, nor do we know how old he is. He says he is in his early 20s, but everyone knows he’s not. We aren’t made aware of these things for reasons that will be made known to us at some point in the film.
Things in Los Angeles don’t go well for either man professionally. They can’t find work. Tommy approaches a well-known Hollywood producer (Judd Apatow) at a restaurant while the man is having dinner. Despite being told this is not the way to go about things, Tommy gives him an uncomfortable rendition of Hamlet before finally being ushered away. This is a further example of Tommy being oblivious to various social cues. But at least Greg is having some success in his personal life. He meets a bartender named Amber (Alison Brie – Sleeping with Other People, The Post), and the two quickly hit it off. Before long, they had been a solid couple, and Tommy was clearly jealous. Unable to find work, Greg prompts Tommy to make their movie with them as the two big stars.
Tommy starts writing the movie script and fast-forwards a couple of years to 2001, and we have the screenplay for The Room. The only thing more preposterous than the script is the movie’s dialog. But Greg doesn’t want to dash his friend’s hopes and tells him it’s good. Tommy assigns himself as Johnny, the film’s main protagonist, and Greg will play Mark, Jonny’s best friend. The two start getting equipment and a set to shoot their movie. When asked if Tommy wants to shoot it as digital or 35mm, he says both. When asked about the type of equipment he wants to rent, he says he’d instead buy. Money is not an issue with Tommy, who wants it all. He purchases the equipment. He accepts a reduced price because he shoots in the guys’ studio, selling him the equipment.
Tommy and Greg quickly agree. Tommy begins the hiring process. He casts Juliette (Ari Graynor – Celeste and Jesse Forever, Whip It) as his lead actress. He brings in Rafael (Paul Scheer) as his director of photography, Sandy (Seth Rogen – 50/50, Steve Jobs) as his script advisor, and others. All are clearly in it for the money because Tommy will do what Tommy wants to do, and attempts to try to rationalize with him will fall on deaf errors. The only thing that Tommy is worse than as a director is an actor. He can’t remember his lines. Everyone else on the set has his lines memorized except for him. Take after take has to be done to solidify a D- rather than an F scene. But Tommy keeps shelling out the money, paying these people above what they could earn at a different gig.
The Disaster Artist is both a comedy and a drama, and I’m unsure which category it fits better. It amused me, but I didn’t laugh very often. And the drama wasn’t as thick as it could have been. Because of this, I didn’t find the film as flat as I initially thought. Instead, I felt it light-hearted and satisfying. Could Tommy’s problems have been dealt with from the perspective of this person needing help? Absolutely. His lack of self-awareness and apparent loneliness were problems that could have been looked at rather than just treated as a novelty. And those he surrounded himself with, outside of Greg, don’t necessarily take advantage of him, but they also do not say no to his generosity.
Greg, the ever-faithful friend, is forced to examine the idiosyncrasies of Tommy when he asks him if he’ll delay shooting a scene for one day so he can appear in an episode of the Bryan Cranston show Malcolm in the Middle. Greg is offered a part based on having the beard of a character needed in an episode. However, Tommy forces him to shave his beard based on the character he is playing in the shooting of The Room. It shows Tommy’s unwillingness to see things in a way that 95% of the population would. It would have involved delaying the shoot of a scene by one day so that his best friend would have a significant career opportunity. But he’s unwilling to do it. Franco could have further examined this component of Tommy, but he chose not to. I don’t think it’s bad that he didn’t. He just decided to take the movie a different route.
As much as Tommy was a free spirit most of the time, he also had emotions at the other end of the spectrum. This included the scene I just mentioned with him forcing Greg to shave his beard even when he could have waited a day, his inability to listen to other’s reasons, and, most poignantly, watching him at the premiere of his movie. His detached expression when others were laughing at scenes that weren’t designed to evoke humor was heartbreaking and almost enough contradiction to his personality in 95% of the movie to earn him an Oscar nomination. I was saddened watching his expression while others laughed incessantly at what he designed to be a serious drama.
The acting is excellent. James Franco is perfectly cast as Tommy, and Dave Franco as Greg. And what an ensemble! The Disaster Artist was the movie that most pleasantly surprised me in 2017.
Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 8/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing 9/10
Cinematography 8/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 9/10 (movies based on true stories get higher scores than ones that don’t when everything else is equal)
84.5%
B
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- The Room
- Ed Wood
- The Wolf Of Wall Street
- The Theory of Everything
- The Interview