Tommy Wiseau makes the effort of acting unusually visible. We find his commitment touching in patches, but The Room is a poor romantic drama whose involuntary comedy does not compensate for the repetition.
Fi1m perspective
In The Room (2003), Tommy Wiseau struggles to make Johnny seem like an ordinary man even in casual conversation. His unusual line readings keep drawing attention to the work of delivering the words. We can see how much feeling he wants to convey, but we seldom believe that Johnny is having it. That makes it hard to follow the romance and trust he means us to care about: we are too busy noticing how he speaks.
Wiseau also writes, directs and produces the film, and his dialogue gives the other actors much the same difficulty. Juliette Danielle’s Lisa and Greg Sestero’s Mark have little chance to establish a convincing rhythm around Johnny. We were touched by Wiseau’s exposed effort in The Room, because the strain of trying to make Johnny’s feelings convincing is so visible. That sympathy did not make the relationships involving.
A cult following developed around the film from the late 2000s, sustained by midnight screenings. Wiseau has kept people coming back, which is an achievement we would not dismiss. The accidental comedy is occasionally welcome, but the repetition makes a full evening hard to recommend. The sincerity matters because the film asks us to care about romance and trust, even when its writing makes that difficult. We still think the fair starting point is the drama he made, before treating its failures as entertainment.
He went on to create the sitcom The Neighbors (2014). He then reunited with Sestero for Best F(r)iends: Volume 1 (2017) and Best F(r)iends: Volume 2 (2018). Sestero wrote the first film, allowing Wiseau to perform somebody else’s dialogue. We would approach his next role with more interest if he let somebody else decide what he ought to say.
Biography
Tommy Wiseau is an American actor, director, writer and producer. He is also known as Thomas Pierre Wiseau and Tomasz Wieczorkiewicz. He trained as an actor at the American Conservatory Theater, the Vince Chase Workshop, the Jean Shelton Acting Lab, Laney College and the Stella Adler Academy of Acting.
In 2003 Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and starred as Johnny in the feature film The Room. The film received the Audience Award at the New York International Film Festival. In 2004 he produced the documentary Homeless in America, which received a Social Award at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.
Wiseau has also appeared in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007), Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (2015), Cold Moon (2016) and the Best F(r)iends films (2017–2018). He featured in the 2017 film The Disaster Artist.
