A mimic is an incredibly skilled person. She or he must rescind everything that makes them who they are in service of becoming another person. A mimic’s attention to detail is awe-inspiring, because to be able to replicate the vocal rhythms and physical tics of someone else is something the vast majority of the human population cannot do.
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| Photo credit: The Disaster Artist/IMDb |
But mimicry often turns into nothing more than a neat party trick. It’s not moving. It’s not storytelling.
And in The Disaster Artist, director-star James Franco takes mimicry to the extreme while the movie around him crumbles into an endless series of “‘member this?!” scene-for-scene recreations of the “so bad it’s good” midnight movie favorite The Room.
As Tommy Wiseau, the mysterious long-haired writer-director-producer-star of The Room, Franco’s imitation is unsettlingly on the mark. He’s got it all—the droopy eye, the overly-dramatic-but-somehow-also-oddly-restrained way of moving, the “New Orleans” accent that is clearly not from anywhere near the continental United States. Franco manages to imbue Wiseau with the beginnings of a soul, filling him with wild hopes and dreams about super stardom and endless praise for his nutso creative vision—and the disappointment that crushes him when the universe laughs in his face.
But that soul is already apparent from Wiseau’s public life since his derided film became a cult favorite around a decade ago. The Disaster Artist tells us nothing new—there are no revelations about Wiseau that you can't glean from seeing his bizarre photo shoots. For example, I have never seen The Room but I know a shocking amount of things about Wiseau through pop culture osmosis. I’ve learned about his uncanny ability to turn every slight and (seemingly well-deserved) criticism into a positive, his embrace of how his hoped-for dramatic star turn has been turned by irony-drenched “appreciators” into an unintentional comedy.
Franco the actor adds little to this, although Franco the director at least makes these character traits feel more intimate via closeups—there’s a series of moving shots during the climax of this picture, when Wiseau hosts The Room’s premiere in front of an audience of confused folks who are ready to heckle. Tommy’s best friend and costar in The Room, Greg Sestero (played with a can-do dopiness by Franco’s real-life younger brother, Dave), finds a way to poke and prod Tommy into celebrating his failure as a secret success in the movie’s only truly emotional beat.
The film undercuts its would-be hopeful celebration of outsider art every chance it gets. For every brief, soaring moment of creative exhilaration or never-give-up hope for a better life is several endless, beat-for-beat recreations of scenes from The Room. It’s hard to understate how long these scenes go. The cast and crew watched, rehearsed, and shot 30 minutes of themselves performing infamous scenes from The Room to include in The Disaster Artist. That’s hundreds of man hours right there, and in service of what?
It’s all seemingly meant to sneer at how bad Wiseau’s movie is. The script, from Scott Neustatdter and Michael H. Weber, nods in the direction of admiring a loopy person’s dogged pursuit of an offbeat dream. But the intent is not followed through in the execution, in which some of Hollywood’s most successful comic actors (including Seth Rogen and Paul Scheer as crew members and card-carrying union members who can’t believe the ineptitude on display in front of them) use decades of combined professional experience to make fun of a less-talented amateur’s work. No matter how moving Dave Franco’s good-natured performance as Greg Sestero is, the “comedy” of James Franco laughing, and forgetting lines, and throwing water bottles on green-screen sets like Tommy Wiseau always takes precedence. This movie is every bit as delusional about itself as the real Wiseau is, because it thinks it's celebrating the creative impulse, but it's only doing so through the lens of ridiculing untalented creators. And that's really off-putting.
Whatever well-meaning earnestness The Disaster Artist aspires to, it beats itself down with an unbalanced repetition of something our culture has deemed worthy only for its capacity to be mocked. It’s like seeing your “funny” friend, whose only comedic talent is quoting the movies he loves, get bummed out for a few minutes before spending the next hour perfecting the tired line, “Oh, hai Mark,” like a true mimic.
Director: James Franco
Writers: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Jackie Weaver, Paul Scheer
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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