The Disaster Artist (2017) - Review
Originally published August 2018The Room—not to be confused with the Academy Award-winning film, Room—is often considered one of the greatest terrible movies of all time, if not the all-time (best) worst. It was a pet project of the mysterious and eccentric Tommy Wiseau, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in it. It is a complete mess of a movie with plots that go nowhere, acting that is embarrassingly bad, and some of the most virally hilarious clips that have been shared on the internet for years since the movie became a cult favorite. The Room is so infamous that even famous people wanted to do a comedy centered around the process of making the constantly exploding train wreck. So, James Franco, his brother, and all their famous and semi-famous friends got together to make The Disaster Artist.
Greg Sestero, who was also in The Room as the secondary lead, wrote the book called The Disaster Artist about his experiences with Tommy Wiseau during the filming of The Room. Franco and friends pulled their script out of this book and slapped the "based on a true story" label on the front of their movie. However, it should be pretty clear, pretty quickly, that this is not going to follow the facts too closely. This is a comedy first, so some liberties were taken with the facts for the sake of making jokes, as well as for the sake of creating drama and conflict when they may not have been there in real life. Unlike in The Imitation Game, where it seemed like a missed opportunity to tell a more interesting story using more true events, The Disaster Artist probably benefited from having some fabricated facts in the script, simply because the movie might have ended up a disjointed mess and without enough jokes to tie it together.
Image: A24
Pros
James Franco's impression of Wiseau is spot-on and consistently funny
When the shooting of The Room starts, the jokes get funnier and funnier
The jealous loneliness they give Wiseau as a character trait, whether real or not, is a funny touch that continues to make effective humor
The recurring jokes around Wiseau's mysterious origins, his money, and his laugh are priceless
Cons
Dave Franco's Greg doesn't seem to learn much in dealing with Tommy and comes across as a gullible goon more than anything else; he makes the same stupid surprised smile and laugh throughout the whole movie
A ton of needless cameos that don't do much for the movie or the comedy
If you don't like The Room or haven't seen it, this movie will likely go over your head
Before the filming of The Room starts, the jokes are a bit hit-or-miss
Sometimes, the humor is a bit too awkward to tolerate
Plot & Thoughts
Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) is taking acting lessons in San Francisco because he has a dream of becoming a star, but is having trouble beating stage fright and finding his voice. There he meets Tommy Wiseau (James Franco), who shows that, while he has no talent for acting, he has no fear of making an ass of himself in front of people. Greg consults Tommy about his techniques, and Tommy motivates him to do better. They become friends, make a pact, and move down to L.A. together to become movie stars. However, after months pass without being able to get any work, Tommy decides to make his own movie.
Image: A24
The premise surrounding the somewhat fictional circumstances regarding the meeting of these two and how The Room came into existence is all pretty cliché, but The Disaster Artist gets away with it because of the fact that it's a self-aware comedy. There are montages of them looking for work in L.A. to the tune of '90s pop songs. When Greg meets a girl and starts a relationship with her, Tommy gets jealous, which is a funny but overused character trait in movies. There's a portion of the movie where their friendship is damaged due to a contrived and arbitrary conflict that springs up suddenly. The fact that it's so cliché in many spots is probably a joke in and of itself. It's all pretty typical, but it works in the movie's favor.
I've never enjoyed James Franco in the past, but his impression of Wiseau is quite spot-on, and he makes the film vastly more entertaining. The lines he says, as well as his delivery, are all consistently hilarious. His goofiness is definitely what carries the first half of the film when it's just Tommy and Greg trying to get their careers started in L.A. It also borders on "too awkward to watch" at times, which is not really my preferred type of humor. However, it never strays too far in that direction and manages to stay chuckle-worthy for a while.
Image: A24
It's once the filming of The Room starts that the jokes they've written really start to hit their mark and The Disaster Artist really starts to get pretty damn funny. This is mainly due to the fact that it's not just Greg reacting to Tommy's weird behavior anymore. There are countless other people on staff with the filming of his movie to react to his nonsense, with Seth Rogen's character probably being the funniest one to deal with Wiseau's nonsense. The comedy gets a lot better in this section of the movie with discussions around Tommy's decision to laugh at a dark story during a scene, his inability to get a terribly dumb line right that he wrote, or his insistence on being naked on set for a sex scene in which he doesn't seem to know what he's doing. The only downside to all the jokes they've written for these parts of the movie is that a lot of it is dependent upon the assumption that you've seen and enjoyed The Room. If you haven't, or you don't like it, or you know nothing about how weird Wiseau really is, a lot of the Disaster Artist's humor will probably not hit.
My main criticism of The Disaster Artist sits mostly with Greg and the first half of the movie. Greg just reacts the same way to Tommy's nonsense till about the point when they have their contrived conflict. The number of times I saw the same smile followed by an awkward laugh at something that Tommy said or did would make a rough drinking game rule with the frequency at which it happens. It's not like Greg needs to be a fully developed character for a self-aware comedy, but Dave Franco could have done a little more to make him seem like a person and less like every Jason Biggs character. He just isn't enough to really make all the jokes in the first half of the movie land, so you're mostly stuck just having to awkwardly laugh along at the absurd thing that James Franco is doing in his favorite persona, or at the random jokes written for Franco's various Hollywood friends who had nothing else to do that day. It works well enough to get to the good stuff, but it takes a little too long for the movie to get really funny.
Image: A24
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The Disaster Artist ends up being an extremely funny fictional take on the making of one of the most notoriously bad movies ever made. James Franco does a great job playing Tommy Wiseau, and the rest of the cast does a good job of building the comedy out of the absurdity. It takes a while for the humor to be more consistent until the second half, but once it starts landing, it's a lot of fun. It isn't quite as funny as just watching The Room, but it is still a recommendable watch for anyone who enjoys that movie.
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