Room with a View

As Jack is rolled into the carpet, hopes of a better future get wrapped with him. A future that will be as challenging as the act of wiggling out of the carpet in the back of the pick-up truck. He pretends to be dead, only to be born again in a new world.

A powerful attribute of any art form is its ability to touch on a universal theme. A theme, that dissolves physical and political distinctions. Room, a movie by Lenny Abrahamson, is an experience that delivers just that. For me, the story of Ma and Jack, extracts from our need to imagine a better future. For ourselves and for people that we love. And it is for this imagined future, that we take risks. We step into zones, which did not exist. Desperation of wiggling out of the present, for something that will hopefully be better.

Through Jack we make sense of a singular world. A world with aliens, an egg-shell snake and night which starts in a closet and ends in a bed. It is only Ma’s experiences that determine the limitations of this world. She screams in desperation once, “I am choosing for both of us”. And she does.

For Jack, the room is hardly traumatic. It is a universe that he understands. While his mother hints at his growing cerebral capacities, till that point and even beyond, it was Jack’s world. Jack can easily be a metaphor for each and every marginalized thought or community. His relationship with the Room is in sharp contrast to what we expect, given our understanding of the situation.

Room is a story of resilience, not as a virtue, but as an inherent attribute of humans. It is not an occasional tool, as we experience with Jack and his mother in their life beyond the Room, but the background against which we position ourselves.