You Won't Recognise James Franco In Cinematic Masterpiece 'The Disaster Artist'

THE DISASTER ARTIST

When witness to a truly bad film, a common audience reaction is ‘How did this get made?’ That’s forever the reaction —perhaps amplified with choice vulgarities— when confronted with the 2003 abomination The Room, a ridiculous soap-opera that challenges all your preconceived notions of drama, acting, narrative-continuity, and sex scenes. It was the work of Tommy Wiseau, a writer/director/producer/star who sunk $6mil of his own money into the film, living out his movie-star dreams in spite of a complete lack of talent, and a bizarre Borat-by-way-of-Inspector-Clouseau accent (amazingly, he claims it’s the product of growing up in New Orleans). Greg Sestero’s book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, pulled back the curtain on the tall, true tale of its production, but went further. Sestero, Wiseau’s co-star, chronicled not just how Wiseau came to pull off something so remarkably ill-conceived, but how he was a willing collaborateur; the film the culmination of a bizarre friendship.

And, so, it’s come to screen, with James Franco pulling Wiseau-esque triple-duty: serving as producer and director, and then donning the wig and the vampiric accent to play Tommy. The greatest success of The Disaster Artist is that Franco manages to make his role more than just sketch-show-esque mimickry, to play Wiseau as character, not caricature. For all Wiseau’s mumbles, his foibles, his weird obsessions, his abusive behaviour, and his spectacular cluelessness, the actor finds the humanity, the empathy, the ache at Tommy’s centre. Here, he’s a figure of pathos, sad in his ridiculousness; a doomed dreamer who falls ass backwards into success, only when his horrid attempts to author drama play, to the rest of the world, as comedy.

Adapting Sestero’s memoir, screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber (best known for their run of young-adult adaptations: The Spectacular Now, The Fault In Our Stars, Paper Towns) straighten on the novel’s alternating chapters, which bounced between backstory and production; choosing, instead, to tell it on a purely-linear path. Franco, though, chooses to open the film with an unexpected documentary device: well-lit Hollywood heavies (JJ Abrams, Kevin Smith, Kristen Bell, Lizzy Caplan, Adam Scott, Ike Barinholtz, Keegan-Michael Key, Danny McBride) talk about their obsessions with The Room; serving as celebrity endorsers, effectively, of the comedy to follow.

It opens in 1998 in San Francisco: where Greg (Dave Franco!) is a struggling actor, a teen model who, delivering monologues in Melanie Griffiths’ acting class, is too meek, too nervous. He’s weirdly entranced by the older, wilder, greasy-haired type who throws himself into terrible performances without fear or shame. They become a buddy-movie duo, moving to LA to pursue their acting dreams; bromance tipping towards repressed-romance in all the moments that Tommy gets pissy about Greg finding a girlfriend (Alison Brie). Beneath the bonding-over-James-Dean movies and original-odd-couple roommate squabbles, there’s a darkness to Tommy, who is secretive, possessive, manipulative; who records all of their phone conversations, and prone to outbursts of anger. Despite the fact he has “a malevolent presence” (as Bob Odenkirk, in a tiny role as method-acting teacher, memorably puts it), Tommy sees himself as the hero of his own story; a self-made man who’s going to make his own dreams reality.

The Disaster Artist situates itself at the sweet spot of dreams, delusion, and dogged determination; chronicling a catastrophic production driven forward by one obsessed egotist who refuses to listen to advice, criticism, or anyone telling him all the shit he’s doing wrong. As filmmaker (within the film), he’s a repellent figure: full of entitlement, paranoia, and demands; a scene in which he humiliates the luckless actress tasked with sharing the film’s endless ’80s-skin-flick sex-scenes (Ari Graynor) capturing The Room’s mastermind at his most horrifying, a small-timer aping the abuses doled out by big-time movie-biz broze for time immemorial.

When The Room eventually screens, herein, on close, the opening-night gala-premiere audience reacts to it the way all viewers have since: by laughing, derisively, intoxicated by its unparalleled badness. This climax presages the cult phenomenon that, IRLz, continues to grow: The Room still playing, around the world, at midnight screenings filled with eager audience participation. Like those viewers who’ve made the film their own, The Disaster Artist serves to rescue The Room from oblivion; seeks to tell the human story behind its making, and rehabilitate the experience of all who suffered through production. It’s, ultimately, a work of redemption; a noble end for one of cinema’s most infamous catastrophes.

TULIP FEVER

“I’ve got a nice thick eel!” leers a fishmonger in Tulip Fever, an unexpectedly-bawdy, batty, badly-mounted period-piece dumped into cinemas in the wake of the Weinstein Co. going from Oscar-courting prestige-picture-peddlers to imprint of ultimate movie-biz infamy. Based on a novel by Deborah Moggach, the film was originally intended for an early-’00s adaptation —John Madden directing Jude Law, Keira Knightboat, and Jim Broadbent— before being shelved for a decade. Even once a new production was mounted, though, the shelving continued: filmed in 2014, Tulip Fever has hung around for years; arriving, finally, anticlimactically, to a generally disinterested world.

It’s an ersatz-feeling Europudding pic, a tale set against the Tulipomania of ultra-wealthy 17th-century Holland (where everyone has English accents), that can’t decide if it wants to be a study of bubble economies, an earnest Oscar drama, or a bedroom-hopping farce.

The problems, well, they obviously start at the top, but they’re also embodied in the form of the two leading actors: Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander. They’re both generically-attractive and utterly boring, giving performances absent any life, their supposed scandalous-passion feeling wooden, unconvincing, perfunctory. DeHaan is good at playing smug pricks, but as hero he’s wildly miscast; Vikander, again, plays a veritable blank canvas, a personality-free ‘beauty’ upon which men can project their own desires.

DeHaan is an artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Vikander’s upwardly-mobile orphan and her much-older, incredibly-wealthy husband, Christoph Waltz, a jolly old gent who deals in spices and loves to fuck. There’s a whole bunch of other storylines that get short shrift (Judi Dench as an Abbess whose nuns are in the tulip-biz seems interesting, but is barely given a glimpse); and some weird casting decisions, including an early-career Cara Delevingne playing a cockney trollope, and Zach Galifianakis a sozzled boozehound.

It’s all an odd mish-mash that never coheres; whose story feels cobbled together, the ‘best bits’ of the book plainly picked out, details be damned. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling, director Justin Chadwick likely falling victim to the previous thing Weinstein was infamous for: indiscriminately cutting away at movies from his producer’s chair.

GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

How stiff do you like your stiff-upper-lip Englishness? Here, Simon Curtis directs a period-piece tearjerker in which anyone, within, when remotely upset, is commanded “don’t blubber” in duly toffee accents. It’s the backstory of the authorship of Winnie-The-Pooh, with Domhnall Gleeson playing the ultra-dry, ultra-wry, ultra-buttoned-up distant-dad who took his kid’s games with soft-toys and turned them into one of history’s most famous childhood sagas (and future Disney branding behemoth).

Shellshocked from his service in the “ward to end all wars”, Gleeson relocates his family from West End London, much to the chagrin of socialite wife Margot Robbie (accent ever-so plum, hair ever-so immaculate), but to the delight of his bowl-cutted boy, the real-life Christopher Robin (Will Tilston).

There, in a house by, um, a hundred acre wood, he struggles to write his great work: a treatise against war. But when wife and nanny (Kelly Macdonald) head back to London, distant-dad is thrown into parenting-101, forced to spend time with his wide-eyed tyke; to play games with a collection of soft-toys that include a bear, a piglet, a tiger, a kangaroo, etc. Screenwriters Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Simon Vaughan labour, in this act, to ascribe a genesis moment for everything; to give viewers sitting around and waiting for the writing of Winnie-the-Pooh those moments of ‘a-ha!’ recognition.

The film picks up —and picks up steam— when the book goes from in-conception to publishing-sensation in a breathless montage, turning into a runaway success that highjacks the family’s life. Curtis succeeds in using pace to disorient the audience: after the stilled, English-idyll times of dappled-sunlight-shining-through-the-woodland-wonder, the instant acclaim and media frenzy that greets the story (Fleabag as a nosy reporter!) feels unsettling; and the way lil’ Christopher Robin grows up in a blink, via a handful of bullied-by-private-schoolboys edits, is borderline traumatising.

The story is a tale of fame and fortune creating resentment and estrangement, especially when fed by repressive English manners. Ultimately, though, Goodbye Christopher Robin ends with a grand emotional climax, the sort of thing any Oscar-season prestige-pic needs.

MUDBOUND

Mudbound is an Oscar-season prestige-pic both old-fashioned and new. It’s a grand American saga, a mid-20th-century tale about two families —one white, one black— that share the same rural Mississippi farming lands, whose fates grow intertwined when both find boys sent off to fight in World War II. The film boasts epic sweep, contemporary thematic resonance, film stars (Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige), and, already, building awards-show buzz. But it’s not coming to your local tasteful arthouse cinema; instead, Mudbound is streaming on Netflix.

Mulligan plays a metropolitan Memphian who’s horrified when her husband, Clarke, packs the family off for a fly-blown dirt-heap deep in the Dirty South, bringing along his unrepentantly-racist pops (Jonathan Banks) for good measure. On their land are a family of tenants who pick cotton for themselves; father Rob Morgan sure to intone that they’re not share-croppers, but independent farmers.

The symbolism of the farm is obviously loaded, and the markers of segregation —the separate entrances, the divided buses, the ‘no coloreds’ signs— are shown with due dread. Especially for Mitchell, who, in Europe, served in an African-American troop welcomed by locals as emancipators; there due irony in having fought in progressive countries on behalf of the regressive country back home. When he returns, he strikes up a friendship —heavy on the booze and shared PTSD— with Hedlund, Clark’s prodigal brother. It’s a friendship that ruffles local feathers, and pushes the drama towards a dark end.

Director Dee Rees —maker of the 2011 coming-out drama Pariah— is, here, adapting Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel. The echoes of the source-text are, as always, made plain by narration; the narrative, and the voice-overs, passed between the principle six characters, making for unexpected shifts in story, empathy, perspective. It’s a well-mounted, well-made film that delivers on its prestige-pic bona fides, feeling familiar even as it’s sent out to the world via nascent means of distribution.

THE TEACHER

In 1983, at a school in Bratislava, a new teacher’s first exercise with the class is to invite each pupil down the front, where they can tell everyone —but especially her— what their parents do. It might sound like a seemingly-innocent act of getting-to-know-you class presentation, but soon Zuzana Muréry’s endless-manipulative titular character reveals it to be anything but: the occupations suggesting who can be leveraged for favours, blackmailed to hand out preferential treatment, and placed on the watch-lists of the omnipresent Party.

Jan Hrebejk’s film succeeds as both a suffocating portrait of Eastern Bloc terror and a black-comic depicting of bribery, corruption, and cronyism. Mauréry relishes the fantastically-loathsome, portrait-of-passive-aggressiveness role at the film’s centre, but Petr Jarchovský’s screenplay fashions a well-judged, well-balanced ensemble; looking at how a whole classroom full of kids, and their parents, become either allies or enemies of this new tin-pot despot.

In a remarkable extended sequence, the parents gather together, at a night-time meeting, to debate the actions of the teacher. As testimonies, rejoinders, and insults are tossed back-and-forth, The Teacher evokes the emotions and motion of group dynamics: lines are drawn, divisions set in, scapegoats are sought; larger socio-political issues remaining unspoken, but forever palpable.