The Disaster Artist

The most successful moments of 2017's THE DISASTER ARTIST may well be those ultra uncomfortable recreations on the movie set.  One of them has Tommy Wiseau humiliating his co-star right before a big sex scene.  The arguments with Greg Sestero right after also have a certain genuineness.  Was it really like this while Wiseau's legendarily awful movie THE ROOM was shot? James Franco, who plays Tommy and directs this adaptation of Sestero's book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made (which I've not read), makes the case with a film that is essentially a comedy but doles out some heavy drama as well.  Er, but, so does THE ROOM? Um, did I get that backwards?

Franco historically has been a prankster, and maybe nothing is to be taken seriously here.  Not even the straight faced moments when Greg confronts Tommy, or when Tommy confronts everyone else with his truly bizarre behavior.  This walking enigma, a very wealthy weirdo with an unclassifiable accent and a dream of acting, brought Sestero with likewise desires to Los Angeles and put him up in his apartment.  Is Tommy gay? Does he have some other motive? Apparently, he really was just a good-hearted man who only wanted acceptance from the world.  To for once not feel betrayed by everybody.  L.A. of course is not the town for that goal.

THE DISASTER ARTIST paints Wiseau just that way.  A desperate guy you should feel sorry (and root) for.  One who created a terrible movie that became a "so bad it's good" sensation, one to join ranks with MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.  He lucked into fame, but then don't so many others in Hollywood? He becomes a monster on the set, and justifies it by comparing his behavior to that of Hitchcock and Kubrick.  But they at least knew, eh, a thing or two about film making.

Wiseau does not.  Not at all.  Or about acting or screenwriting.  These things may have been in his favor.  THE ROOM is an astonishingly bad film that is indeed a laugh riot, one that continues to play on the midnight movie circuit around the world. Wiseau makes a perfect hero/target for guys like Franco and his comic contemporaries Seth Rogen (who produced DISASTER and plays Sandy, the script supervisor) and Judd Apatow (as a fictional film producer accosted in a restaurant by Wiseau).  Are they celebrating him as they snicker? Aren't we all?

THE DISASTER ARTIST never finds confidence in its tone.  It wants to be a caustic skewer yet also an underdog drama.  The latter constantly works against the movie.  There are cliched moments that were a bit tough to take, as when one of the actors, after a particularly bad morning states "...even the worst day on a movie set is better than the best day doing something else."  Much of this movie is lamentably tedious, even laborious, especially during those uncomfortable scenes of which I spoke.  Wait, didn't I say those where the most successful ones? Yes, on their own they are quite effective.  Within this particular film, they seem out of place.  Again, Franco never really coheres his approach.  Never finds the same perfect mix of humor and pathos as did Tim Burton for ED WOOD.

But he does nail his performance as Wiseau.  Only occasionally does it feel like caricature.  With Tommy Wiseau, it's hard to tell anyway.