{"id":1933,"date":"2016-02-14T14:22:14","date_gmt":"2016-02-14T14:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1933"},"modified":"2016-02-14T17:38:42","modified_gmt":"2016-02-14T17:38:42","slug":"oscars-2016-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2016\/02\/14\/oscars-2016-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2016: Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"room\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Based on the 2010 novel and adapted for the screen by the author, Room<\/em> is the story of\u2026<\/p>\n

No, wait \u2013 stop.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost impossible to go and see a movie today without having already sat through countless trailers, clips, interviews, reviews and featurettes. If you haven\u2019t heard anything about Room<\/em> yet, then just stop reading now and go and see it. I wish I had gone in \u201ccold\u201d because as much as I got out of it, I can\u2019t imagine how much more rewarding it would be to see especially the first third gradually unfold.<\/p>\n

Okay. The rest of this review won\u2019t be too spoilerific, but I\u2019m not going to type on egg-shells either. Where was I?<\/p>\n

Room <\/em>is the story of Brie Larson\u2019s Joy Newsome, kidnapped and imprisoned as a sex slave at the age of 17. Now, seven years later, she is bringing up her five-year-old son Jack who has no knowledge or understanding of any kind of world outside the four walls of \u201croom\u201d. Not knowing any of this before going in would make the first third or so of the film a horrible puzzle to be unravelled. We are just presented with Joy and Jack\u2019s mundane life within this tiny space \u2013 making a birthday cake, running from one side of the room to another for exercise, watching TV. Eventually, both Jack\u2019s lack of comprehension of anything outside, and the appearance of their captor \u201cOld Nick\u201d makes it terrifyingly clear what has transpired.<\/p>\n

When Old Nick loses his job, Joy realises that if he is no longer able to pay for even the meagre rations they live on, then he will have no option but to kill them both. She attempts to get him to take Jack to hospital by pretending he has a fever and when that doesn\u2019t work, she hatches an even more desperate plan to have Jack play dead and get Nick to take away the \u201cbody\u201d in a rolled-up carpet.<\/p>\n

This execution of this escape plan is some of the most tense and buttock-clenching movie making I\u2019ve seen and it\u2019s also around this time both that the movie transitions into its second phase and that the importance of point of view comes to the fore. Director Lenny Abramson (Frank<\/em>) brilliantly captures Jack\u2019s disorientation as he finally sees something of the world, but from this moment on, he and writer Emma Donoghue keep Jack at the centre of the action. As the police officers who pick him up struggle to piece together just who he is and where he came from, we are denied even a hint of what is going on with Nick and Joy back in the prison.<\/p>\n

The remaining two thirds of the movie documents Jack and Joy\u2019s slow rehabilitation as they come to terms with how much has changed and how much is unfamiliar. Joy reconnects with her parents William H Macy (removed from the narrative with unseemly haste) and Joan Allen, faces the overwhelmingly media scrutiny that her high-profile case has attracted and relearns how to be a parent, a daughter, a person in the world. Jack gradually learns to trust adults and other children, to play with toys and games, and begins to experience life as a normal five-year-old for the first time.<\/p>\n

Unlike last year\u2019s over-praised Boyhood<\/em>, which set up the possibility of an adult story told through gradually maturing eyes, and then fudged it with a slack narrative structure which wandered in-and-out of its characters\u2019 lives seemingly at random, Room<\/em> is absolutely ruthless in telling the story only through Jack\u2019s eyes and it\u2019s all the better and richer for it. Giving us only glimpses of the complexities of the adult emotions, crises and conflicts does nothing to rob them of emotional power, but prevents them from tipping into TV movie-of-the-week mawkish sentimentality as well as giving us a fascinating and unique lens through which to see this tale of awful horror, terrifying ordeal, grim recovery and finally closure.<\/p>\n

Larson, who has been a perky figure in a number of movies and TV shows before now, absolutely shines in this role of a lifetime, investing Joy with a ghastly forced optimism, then a desperate pragmatism and makes her descent into depression and self-loathing entirely believable. But the movie belongs to Jacob Tremblay who is nothing short of extraordinary as Jack. This is either the birth of an acting superstar or a phenomenal piece of coaching and editing by Abramson, or more than likely a perfect combination of the two.<\/p>\n

While the story is relatively slight (although still weightier than Brooklyn<\/em>), the execution is so good and the challenges of the narrative so great that I have little hesitation in naming Room<\/em> my favourite of the Best Picture nominees so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Based on the 2010 novel and adapted for the screen by the author, Room is the story of\u2026 No, wait \u2013 stop. It\u2019s almost impossible to go and see a movie today without having already sat through countless trailers, clips, interviews, reviews and featurettes. If you haven\u2019t heard anything about Room yet, then just stop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[477],"class_list":["post-1933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-oscars-2016"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-vb","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1937,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions\/1937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}