Review: The Disaster Artist

A film that details the making of the infamously bad movie “The Room”, directed by the bizarre and incompetent Tommy Wiseau (James Franco). Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, a struggling actor who joins forces on the project with his friend Tommy, whilst Ari Graynor, Jacki Weaver, and Josh Hutchison all play actors from “The Room”. Megan Mullally plays Greg’s worried mother who doesn’t understand what the clearly older and untalented Wiseau wants with her son.

I’m a lover of movies that are ‘so bad, they’re funny’, although I get annoyed whenever someone chooses to term them ‘so bad, they’re good’, a term that just makes zero sense to me. These are the types of people who think Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 From Outer Space” to be too entertaining to be called the ‘Worst Movie Ever Made’. Nope, “Plan 9” earned that distinction, I’d rather Edward D. Wood Jr.’s craptacular magnum opus be afforded that lofty throne rather than something truly bad but completely boring like say “Eraserhead”, “Equus”, or “Stop! – Or My Mom Will Shoot!”. Oh, they’re definitely on the list of Worst Movies Ever Made, but #1? Nope, that is and forever likely shall be “Plan 9”. I never quite got into Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” the way many seem to have, with all the “Rocky Horror”-esque midnight screening audience participation and so on. For a certain generation, this is their “Plan 9”. I caught on to it pretty late, to be honest only seeing it less than 5 years ago maybe. The main reason I’m not convinced that this is the heir apparent to “Plan 9” is that whilst a terrible film and one of the worst movies ever made, it’s one of those bad movies that is far too boring to really compete with the all-time worst ‘so bad they’re funny’ films like “Plan 9 From Outer Space”, “The Terror of Tiny Town”, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”, “Troll 2”, and “Glen or Glenda?”.

All of that being said, when I heard that director/star James Franco and screenwriters Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber (writers of the unlikeable “The Spectacular Now” and the rather good “Paper Towns”) were gonna have a crack at doing a feature film about the making of “The Room”, the film buff in me was certainly intrigued. Surely the making of Tommy Wiseau’s claim to cinematic infamy would be much more entertaining and interesting than “The Room”, and obviously much more technically accomplished. Well, I suppose the second is true, but consider that the competition is a piece of shit. No, this 2017 film is a surprisingly formulaic biopic lacking in any insight whatsoever into the demented auteur Wiseau. In fact, a lot of it plays like a lesser “Ed Wood”, ironically enough.

I did like the opening ‘talking heads’ bit with several famous faces, though. However, this is because I assumed Franco is taking the piss with stuff like that and having Melanie Griffith play an acting coach (!) when the woman is the third best actress in her family, and even her mother and daughter aren’t very good either. So I may be laughing at things unintentionally there, I can’t rightly say. Still, I found amusement nonetheless and perhaps there’s some irony anyway in finding it unintentionally funny that is rather serendipitous. And given Sharon Stone also turns up, I think there’s a good chance Franco is taking the piss a bit. I have to assume at least someone involved here is taking the piss when we see Wiseau re-enact that scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire”, to the point where I expected him to yell ‘Lisa!’ instead of ‘Stella!’. Hilarious stuff. The scene where Tommy recites ‘To Be or Not to Be’ to a pissed off producer in a crowded restaurant may or may not have happened in real-life, but it’s completely bloody believable nonetheless. Judd Apatow is genuinely funny as the very pissed off producer. Speaking of funny, there’s a funny and droll bit of comedy where Wiseau is rehearsing the ‘Oh, hi Mark!’ scene except here he turns to Dave Franco (who plays Greg Sestero) and says ‘Oh, hi Greg!’.

In fact, the humour and performances are the best things here overall. James Franco is a bit of a mixed bag as Wiseau but probably more of a plus than a minus at the end of the day. He doesn’t look remotely like Wiseau (Wiseau looks weathered and rather lethargic, Franco merely hungover), doesn’t sound a whole lot like Wiseau, but credit to him, Franco does act like the Wiseau we see in “The Room”. He has clearly watched “The Room” enough times to have studied Wiseau’s performance in that film. Wiseau is a one-of-a-kind guy so it can’t have been easy to tackle the performance, and his performance overall is still pretty decent. However, director-star Franco never really gets inside Wiseau’s weird head nor offers much background about the guy. I know Tommy is intensely private/vague/inscrutable, but perhaps that’s why a film about him wasn’t the best idea? I dunno, just spit-balling here (Sestero hasn’t even managed to find the source of Tommy’s clearly-not-New-Orleans accent, it took online sleuthing from others to figure it out and even then when Tommy fessed up he merely said he was born in ‘Europe’). James’ brother Dave Franco is a good choice to play Greg Sestero, in fact Dave impressed me a lot more here than James (especially since Sestero is the far less flashy role). Ari Graynor meanwhile, is absolutely perfect casting as actress Juliette Danielle, she seems born for the part. Seth Rogen gets the amusing role of the continuity guy on set. In other words he’s tasked with asking Tommy Wiseau – an idiot who truly believes he’s a genius – obvious and smart questions about why the fuck he’s doing what he’s doing from scene to scene. It must’ve been a nightmare shoot for everyone having to deal with an insane and untalented auteur. That’s why it’s so hilarious when everyone on-set celebrates Wiseau finally getting the ‘I did NOT hit her- Oh hi, Mark!’ bit right after 30+ takes. I don’t know if it actually happened, but it is certainly in-keeping with what one imagines the shoot being like. I also laughed out loud at the mere title card: ‘Shoot Day 58 of 40’. That was priceless. I also have to say that the film does a pretty damn good job at recreating scenes from “The Room”, so fans of the cult fave film will no doubt enjoy the verisimilitude there. For a while I was worried that in addition to being superficial, that this was going to be a rather soft portrayal of Wiseau (After all, Mr. Sestero is still friends with Wiseau to this day, and both have cameos in the film as well). Thankfully the final third touches on the man’s less likeable qualities. The sex scene with Ms. Danielle where he keeps calling her body ‘disgusting’ is pretty amazing to watch, especially in the #MeToo era we’re currently in as of 2019. What a fucking arsehole. I know that the Bryan Cranston cameo here is a work of fiction (and it certainly plays that way on-screen), but I must say I also didn’t buy that the motivating factor for the tension between Wiseau and Sestero was apparently Tommy’s upset that Greg got himself a girlfriend. That seemed too infantile for even Tommy. And by the time we get to the finale, the comparisons to “Ed Wood” really do come to the fore, with both films pretty much climaxing at a film screening of the demented director’s magnum opus. It’s unmistakably similar, and this comes off as a cheap imitation (It’s also largely an invention of the film, as Sestero’s book on which the film is based differs in this regard). I did like the clever post-credits cameo by a disguised Wiseau himself interacting with James Franco playing Wiseau.

A disappointingly, if perhaps inevitably surface-level portrait of a man who is too inscrutable and impenetrable to work as the subject of a biopic. The performances are generally fine and there’s quite a bit of humour, but the depth just isn’t there. I wanted this to be so much better than it is, but to be honest I think watching “The Room”, boring as some of it is, might be more enjoyable than this. Hell, I’d rather just watch “Plan 9 From Outer Space” or “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” than either of them. 

Rating: C+