sonsie

9.5/10. There are times when I feel jaded as a viewer. When it seems like despite the breadth of films out there, that I know most of the tricks, to where while I can appreciate a film's achievements in sort of a detached way, when I can even be engaged and invested in something, it doesn't necessarily reach me in the way that movies did when I first started watching them. The scope of appreciation has widened, but the emotional resonance feels muted, because I can't help but see the strings.

And then a film like Room comes along.

And Jack sees the expanse of sky for the first time. And Joy hugs her parents after not seeing them for seven years. And Robert can't even look at his grandson. And Nancy tells her daughter that she's not the only one whose life was destroyed. And Joy tells her mother that if she hadn't been taught to be nice, she might never have gone with Nick. And there's a supreme, heartbreaking look of guilt on her face when a reporter asks if she should have given her son up while in captivity. And Jack walks in on his mother's suicide attempt. And Nancy hears her grandson say "I love you." And Jack sees a real live dog, and makes a real live friend, and cuts his hair to give his mother his strength.

And I wince and I laugh and I cry and I gasp at this beautiful, devastating, intimate, life-affirming film. This is why we make movies. I love popcorn films, with the fights and flashes and epic feel, and I love the big dramas, with their scope and their sense of grandness and the talent on display, and I love those classic film comedies that mix the absurd and the irreverent and the memorable into a single hilarious package. But the films like Room simultaneously so small and so personal, yet so powerful and affecting, have a special place. These are, as Robert Ebert once put it, the empathy machine that is film working at peak efficiency, taking us into the lives of people who have suffered and been unfathomably wronged, and carries us with them as they carve out a way forward.

I didn't know I wanted a film that feels like a cross between Oldboy, Life Is Beautiful, and Boyhood, and yet the elements Room shares with each--the sense of isolation, the loving way in which a parent tries to distract their child from a continuing tragedy, the slice-of-life, impressionistic depiction of a young boy's innocence--come together to form something absolutely tremendous.

That last facet of the film, the fact that it filters the entire experience through young Jack's eyes, is a stroke of brilliance. There's a matter of factness, a certain directness or even blitheness to the way children experience the world. Using Jack as the lens through which Room tells its story renders those events not only realer, but plainer, imbuing them with the unvarnished perception of childhood. The way the film is able to get into Jack's head, to allow the audience to view these horrors and steps to recovery through his eyes, is its greatest strength and most impressive achievement.

By the same token, Brie Larson as Joy deserves all the accolades she's received for her performance here. While still a prisoner, she carries herself with such an air of both utter resignation and quiet resolve, someone who's been beaten into submission but carries on with whatever she has left. And once she returns home, the guilt that consumes her, the anger that she has for the world that kept turning without her, are palpable in every moment without fading into overwroughtness.

The film can essentially be divided into those two halves. The first is the story of Jack and Joy in Room, of the way that Joy makes unbearable circumstances livable for her son, the way that she copes and shields Jack from the horror around him, and how Jack strains and struggles to understand the idea of the world beyond those four walls, to where he can, eventually, help the two of them escape. The second half is far less intense, but still endlessly intriguing and affecting. It's a quiet domestic story about how people recover from that sort of trauma, both Joy who feels the opposite of survivor's guilt and second guesses herself, and Jack who is exposed to a big scary world, the depth and breadth of which is entirely alien to him.

But throughout both halves, there is such a pure emotional truth in each moment, from the simple joys that Jack enjoys within the home he doesn't realize is a prison, to his anger and resistance at having that fantasy shattered, to Joy's dispirited but resolute attempts to keep him happy and healthy, to the realistic, painful difficulties parents and children face when rebuilding a family seven years after a tragedy, to the wonder and fear a small boy has for what lies beyond the garden gate, and the unmitigated joy at every step taken toward some cobbled-together normalcy. Room is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, intensely personal film, that takes an unflinching yet uplifting look at how people cope and come back from the worst that our world has to offer.

Visual perfection

A story about an inspiring, wholesome, tense, rubik's cube-solving friendship! I sobbed for the whole 40 minutes!