The Disaster Artist

"I'll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and... you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch."
-- Tommy Wiseau, per The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell 

I'm not going to try to explain The Room. Because I can't. Anyone who claims they can adequately explain the film in less time than it takes to watch it is lying. But as a psychological case study meets film-making how-not-to crash course, The Disaster Artist is worthwhile. At the very least, it's entertaining.

Greg Sestero is a struggling actor and much-too loyal and forgiving friend, which, combined, help to explain how a good-hearted guy with potential and a wild dream fell into the orbit of Tommy Wiseau and thenceforth into The Room. First brought on as a line producer, Sestero eventually inherits the role of "the Mark," best friend and cuckold-maker to Wiseau's protagonist "Johnny." With ghostwriter Tom Bissell, Sestero spins a yarn of the inept production of a bad movie and a decade-long friendship with the incomprehensible Wiseau. 

Alternating chapters are dedicated to Sestero's stop-start acting career. These chapters make for a decent story and the reader feels for his frustrations, but they are fraught with a burning question: Where's Tommy?

Luckily, Tommy is never more than a page or two away from calling Sestero, or showing up at the apartment he's let to Sestero, or moving in with Sestero. All the while, Wiseau manipulates the poor kid (at least twenty years his junior, though no one's totally sure of Wiseau's true age, likely not even Wiseau himself) into hanging out with him--and no one else, ever--or indulging him in his self-evidently awful "feature movie" project. These traits--the manipulation, the neediness, the pitiable misconceptions about himself and the world around him--veer from funny to sad to terrifying at a pace that leaves the reader marveling at Sestero's hardiness.

The world has plenty of people who exhibit these behaviors, of course, but few of them have a bank account that an uncircumspect teller would describe as "a bottomless pit." However and whenever he attained his fortune (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is an exiled heir to the Habsburg throne, allowed to keep his money in exchange for never returning to Austria), he has been insulated from ever having to embrace anything like reality. Sestero calls The Room a testament to "unrelenting drive and determination," proof that a dream--however ill-concieved--can be made real. But it helps a lot when you're able to put up six million dollars of your own money to ensure that that dream is realized.

And by all appearances, Wiseau believed that The Room would be a genuine masterpiece, a modern day Sunset Boulevard, a comparison Sestero makes in regard to his relationship with Wiseau, except that Norma Desmond's pretensions to talent and fame weren't entirely delusional. It's hard to know what he'd make of this book. Or the title. But when his film continues to make money hand over fist, it's hard to tell him otherwise. It's not Avatar, but people on multiple continents continue to line up to see The Room--and convince their friends to join them--in a way they don't for films that they think are well-made. Blame my generation's love affair with irony (though I'd argue that many people's love for The Room punches straight through irony, passing into total sincerity), but Tommy Wiseau has done very well for himself, if not for the reasons he might think.

There's a lost chance toward the end of Disaster Artist, when the world premiere of The Room brings Wiseau's dream to life, to explain how that first small, cobbled together audience interpreted the film and how it shifted from that into the cult hit acknowledged in the introduction. All we get is a beaming, tearful Wiseau and a dashed-off "proud of you, buddy" from a guy who's spent the previous 300 pages catering to everything that the cult is dying know. But maybe that's not Sestero's story to tell. As he observes, "The magic of The Room derives from one thing: no one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does."

Wiseau is a perfect little mystery: an indeterminate origin, an unfounded self-confidence, a palpable disconnect with human experience; the money might help explain those last two things but where did that come from? Sestero takes a stab at unpacking the mystery, outfitting Wiseau with a thin biography informed by vague, sparse, and largely unverifiable facts. This biography does provide an plausible source for The Room's funding, but the explanation for how that money was generated is not a tidy one, by Sestero's admission.

The Room should be some kind of Kaufman-esque hoax (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is Andy Kaufman), but if it were a hoax, we'd know. Wouldn't we? No parody could be this perfect; we'd see the strings. There'd have to be some kind of wink to the audience. But there isn't. The Disaster Artist seals it--this movie really, somehow, was allowed to happen. Real human beings experienced and endured Tommy Wiseau in all his paranoia, poor judgment, and financial schizophrenia (sometimes a miser, sometimes spending lavishly and nonsensically).

Tommy Wiseau exists and the way he interacts with the world is every bit as bizarre as fans would suspect, while simultaneously so disappointingly benign. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve, making for an awkward obsessive whose every short coming is telegraphed. And his failure to assimilate is not through a lack of trying; at heart, he's more American than you or I. Wiseau is not a mad villain, just mad. And if The Room brings joy to audiences, he can't be a totally awful filmmaker. Just kind of an awful filmmaker.

The Room is still a terrible movie, after all.

Grade: B+