*** This review may contain spoilers ***
"I did not hit her! It's not true! It's bulls***t! I did not hit her! I did NOTTT. Oh hi, Mark." – Tommy Wiseau (The Room)
Released in 2003, "The Room" would have faded into obscurity had it not, like most of Ed Wood's films, possessed the right mixture of sincerity, god-awful ineptness, and unintentional humour. Within months the film had become a cult classic, playing in packed Los Angeles theatres to legions of screaming fans.
What makes the film hilarious is Tommy Wiseau, a talentless and egotistical auteur, who wrote, directed, produced, financed and starred in this six million dollar flick. The classic self-important European artist, Wiseau sees himself, not only as a serious actor, but a serious writer and director. He thinks he's written a Shakespearean plot, when in reality this is a childish love triangle. He thinks his dialogue flies like Tennessee Williams, but in reality it is worse than that offered by the Disney Channel. He thinks his direction rivals Cassavetes, but in reality...well, he was so confused, he shot the film on both HD and celluloid cameras, mounted side by side because he didn't know which camera was which.
And yet there is something captivating about Wiseau's performance. His accent is odd, he approaches each word from a strange angle, he puts emphasis on the wrong syllables, he structures sentences in off kilter rhythms, he inserts punctuation in the wrong places and has his dialogue branch off in weird tangents. Listening to Wiseau speak is like watching the English language being re-invented. It should be god awful, but it's strangely interesting. Like David Mamet, his intonations, his verbal tempo, is almost balletic.
Whilst all the actors in the film are bad – soft-core porn bad – Wiseau imbues the film with a kind of transcendent badness. He's not bad, so much as he is unaware of the rules of good. He's so earnest, so confident that his performance, that his art, is the epitome of quality, that his ineptness renders the whole production farcical.
With regards to the film's plot, there are themes of cancer, betrayal, drug abuse, and infidelity, but it's all handled in an awkward way akin to a kindergarten play. At times whole lines of dialogue are dubbed over, often with no regard to the actor's lip movements. Like Ed Wood's "Plan Nine From Outer Space", characters are also oddly replaced by other actors half way through the film, no explanation given. Throw in countless shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, an epically stupid ending, some hilariously badly written dialogue – "Leave your stupid comment in your pocket!", "Chocolate is a symbol of love!", "What kind of money?", "I definitely have breast cancer", "I needed money so I bought drugs!", "I'm fed up of this wur-urld!" - and you have the funniest "so bad it's good" film since Ed Wood.
