Understanding Wiseau’s Subtlety

Find out what’s really in “The Room”

One of the biggest problems in Hollywood is the depiction of disorders. Few films exist on the subject and fewer still properly ever seem to handle it with tact. Characters with any disorder — from autism to stuttering to OCD — are often reduced to caricatures and unable to connect to the audience as a real person. They are instead defined by this singular trait.

In that regard, Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film “The Room” perfectly captures what it is like to have such a disorder and the strain of caring for someone with it.

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is a successful banker with a stay at home fiancée, Lisa (Juliette Danielle). When she falls for his best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), Johnny’s life begins to unravel and he makes a decision that will change the lives of the people around him forever.

Johnny is a man with an obvious communication disorder. Though never explicitly stated in the film, his bizarre speech and incomprehension of other people’s words and social cues lend a tasteful hint to audience members.

The best example of this is when his informal son, Denny, expresses to him that he may be in love with Lisa. Johnny seems unfazed.

The delicacy in which his disability is handled is largely due to Wiseau’s masterful storytelling. No one in the film ever mentions or gives an indication of its existence. In fact, the only characters that ever demonstrate even cursory knowledge of Johnny’s ailment until the film’s climax are Lisa and Mark.

And in truth, the film is really about the three’s struggling relationship.

“The Room” is rife with intentional unresolved subplots to highlight this. Lisa’s mother mentions that she has breast cancer, only for it to never come up again. A character appears only in the last twenty minutes of the film to express his disapproval of Lisa and Mark’s affair. Each subplot is briefly introduced and promptly forgotten — both in the film and in the larger problems of the three main characters.

Lisa, the seemingly idyllic fiancée at the beginning of the film, reveals her true nature as she cracks under the pressure of living with Johnny and his disorder. As a character, she is manipulative, materialistic, and selfish.

“I put up with you for seven years,” she says when her affair is revealed. It’s heavily implied that her reasons for being with him are based solely on financial security and that she’s known about his disorder since their relationship began.

This is what drives her into the arms of Mark, his best friend. Mark is impulsive, temperamental, and childish. It’s clear that he never loves her. Despite this, his cold treatment of Johnny at the film’s climax proves that he has grown tired of caring for him as well.

What “The Room” then leaves us with is a modernized, 21st century “Great Gatsby.” A selfish woman wants it all. She abandons the man who actually loves her when things get hard. And no one has a happy ending.

With a plot rich in thematic detail and complexity, the film explores mental disorders and comments on the inherently selfish nature of the human spirit and what it truly means to love someone unconditionally.

The characters constantly tell each other, “Don’t worry about it,” over the course of the film. They say that “everything will be fine.” But in such an emotional romantic drama, it’s impossible not to worry and nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is truly a cinematic experience that viewers will never forget.

Rating: 10/10 football tosses

For more of Wiseau’s work, check out “The Neighbors” available on Hulu Plus

Originally published at www.lbunion.com.