Room | Movie Review

As a reader, it’s always hard to fall into a movie when you’ve read the book. A great example this year is The Martian, and those who’ve read the book can understand the pain felt when watching the film on the big screen. Ridley Scott’s vision, while keeping Andy Weir’s optimism, waters down the most important key element of the book: the survival. Emma Donoghue’s book Room is also one about survival, but it’s also one about a very young boy coming-of-age and discovering the world. It’s a movie about rebirth and discovery, and it’s all told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy who has lived in a box all of his young life. Lenny Abrahamson understood that, and his passion for the literature helped him create a not only faithful adaptation a reader can completely dive into, but one they can relive again like it’s the first time.

Room is about Jack (Jacob Tremblay), a young boy who has grown up in “Room,” a shed in the mysterious Old Nick’s (Sean Bridgers) backyard. Except Jack doesn’t know that. To Jack, Room is all he knows. That’s of course until Ma (Brie Larson) decides they need to escape, and Jack’s the only one who can manage to save them from their living hell. It’s an uphill battle for Jack though, because believing in a world beyond Room is already difficult enough to comprehend, let alone executing a plan to escape once he leaves his solitude.

Abrahamson structures the movie in two parts, exactly like Donoghue’s book: before and after Room. In the first part we really feel Room’s claustrophobia, and Abrahamson makes it believable for an audience to think like Jack, that there’s is no world outside Room. How could there be? The story, without overuse of voice over, is essentially from Jack’s point of view, and not the mother’s. Room is entirely carried by Jacob Tremblay, who is truly a remarkable discovery. He never overacts as children tend to do, and his relationship with Brie’s character of Ma is truly astounding, as they both genuinely feel like one when they’re together, and it’s even worse when they’re apart.

Which brings us to the escape. Normally, this kind of climactic moment would occur at the very end of the film during the third act, but it happens exactly in the middle of the second act after Ma decides it’s time to leave Room after Old Nick shuts down the power for a few days. The escape is heart palpitating, an allusion to one of the stories Jack’s Ma tells him to go to sleep some nights, The Count of Monte Cristo. As Old Nick carries Jack, presumably dead from his point of view, out to the truck the tension is at an all-time high. Except that’s not the only thing – the space is suddenly there. The film is no longer tight and intimate; it’s vast, bright, and beautiful in its dullness. Because you see, Jack escapes in the dead of the winter, at a time where it’s cold, grey, and damp, but it’s still not the confined space of Room. It’s open and Jack and his Ma are free.

Except perhaps the uninviting atmosphere of the frigid winter was purposeful. Jack’s hesitant to fall in love with what his Ma calls “The World.” There are so many new people, food from TV, and something called germs that force him to wear a surgical mask until he can adapt. Everything’s cold. Even Ma feels more distant, and it’s hard to understand why for a boy so young. But the audience understands, and through Jack’s eyes we’re watching a victim of rape recoil and give in to her suffering after seven years of wretched abuse.

What makes Room such a phenomenal, such an exquisitely tragic film is that it’s brave. Abrahamson doesn’t shy away from telling the story through Jack’s point of view, just as he doesn’t shy away from telling a story about a woman full of regret and shame. The movie also never doubts Ma’s love for Jack, which is possibly the most beautiful sentiment of the story. For Ma, Jack was her savior. He was her beacon of light in the darkness of the patriarchal and demeaning space of Room. Room’s about loving the world in all its simplicity, and by the end of the film you will be itching to go out and appreciate its unyielding and subtle beauty.

Writer Emma Donoghue Talks Adapting Room into a Movie

It’s a hard thing, watching something you create being taken over by someone else. It’s even harder when you’re not able to sit through the process with them, waiting for the inevitable crash and burn you’re so sure will happen. Luckily for writer Emma Donoghue, she never felt that with Room. Passionate about who she was working with from the beginning, her and director Lenny Abrahamson brought her acclaimed book to screen beautifully, creating a separate work of art that calls back to the book faithfully without adapting every single moment.

To recap a little bit before you dive into the interview, Room is about a mother and her son who are trapped in a shed that’s owned by a man called “Old Nick.” The boy, Jack (played by Jacob Tremblay), isn’t aware there’s an outside world until his Ma (Brie Larson) tries to convince him of it on his fifth birthday. Ultimately stubborn, Jack refuses to believe his mother’s fables and instead tries to find solace in the comfort of “Room.” However, when things start getting more dangerous for Ma and Jack, Ma has to convince her son to risk his own life to save both of theirs.

Room is expanding nationwide this weekend, November 6. It’s hot on the awards season trail, so make sure you catch it for it’s easily one of the best buzziest films of the year.

How daunting was it seeing your book turned into a film? 

Emma Donoghue: You know by the time I saw it on screen I was just so happy, it was like the birth of a child, but that’s because I had been fully involved. I think for writers who just sell the rights and walk away, it must be very, very weird for them to not be in touch with it through all those evolutions and to suddenly see it different. For me it’s been a great, great pleasure. Doing the adaptation in itself I found really interesting because fiction has certain things it does well, like psychology, you know the moment by moment of what a five-year-old might be thinking, and film does other things well. There’s a lot that’s unspoken in film, so there are lots of scene in the movie where we’re looking at Jacob Tremblay’s face really close up, and you don’t quite know what he’s thinking, but you bring your own stuff to it. You fill in with your own thoughts of what you remember about childhood, whereas in a book things are more spelled out, so I think film has enormous advantages.

Having read the book, it’s all from Jack’s perspective, but in the movie you don’t get to read his mind.

Donoghue: He’s in every scene, but we didn’t want a GoPro Camera on his head or something. We didn’t want it to feel gimmicky.

So how difficult was it adapting your book then, from going inside his head to outside of it?

Donoghue: It would have been very hard if it was about a child in a room alone, but in fact the book is full of dialogue. Everything about Jack spills over in conversation and play with his mother, so I thought we could show a lot of his comfortable inhabiting of Room. I thought we could show that a lot through him washing up, him playing with things, him making crafts, him talking to his Ma…I could imply a lot of that. In the first draft I didn’t use any voice over, because I really wanted to tell the story through the camera, through cinema. I think voice over can be a bit of a crutch; so we only added voice over I think in the last draft when the director said he wanted some voice overs to kind of punctuate it, but we didn’t want to rely on them for giving the child’s thoughts or for explaining things.

How did you choose the moments you wanted voice overs for?

Donoghue: Oh good point. Often it would be moments when Jack would be on his own. You know like there’s one scene where Ma’s depressed for the day and puts her head under the pillow or when she is carted off to a hospital by the paramedics, so often it’s a moment when Jack’s left alone. But it wasn’t just that he was on his own so we needed to say what he was thinking, it was more like those were the kind of breaks between sequences as well. I think we used the voice over kinds of structurally.

One of the most distinct things that popped out to me while reading your book was that Jack was nearsighted, since he never had to use muscles to see far. I love how you still get that fact from the film through the camera, through visual storytelling, rather than exposition.

Donoghue: Yeah, yeah his eyes take a while to develop those muscles.

Did you write that into the script? 

Donoghue: You know I can’t remember, because it’s been such a constant back and forth of creativity. You see Lenny, the director, he was always going back to the book as well. It’s not like I just turned in a script and he worked from there, it was more like the two of us were always trying to find a way to make the same kind of magic happen in film as in the book. He had this tattered copy of the book and he’s always go back to that. Some things I changed first thing, like in my first draft of my screenplay I gave the child short hair, because I thought a mainstream cinema audience is going to be so distracted by the boy with long hair. I thought, “Oh, never mind, I’ll go for short hair,” and Lenny was like, “No, let’s go back to long hair, because that’s a great way to sort of mark the child as a bit different.”

I loved that Jacob and Brie had the same hair, it connected them. 

Donoghue: He thinks he’s in a world of two people, so he sees himself as of Ma, he’s her species. He hasn’t really entered the gendered world, where you line up as boys versus girls, you know. So when he wants to cut his hair it’s sort of like the moment he accepts the terms of our society. “Boys have short hair, I’ll work with this and transfer my power to Ma.”

You obviously worked very close with Lenny. How was it like sharing a story that was originally only your own?

Donoghue: I loved it. I didn’t have the typical experience where’s there’s lots of executives. I didn’t get alienated from my own work like the film process can so often do to writers. It was very hands on. Lenny would fly over to Canada where I live and we’d sit around the kitchen table, you know. He’d give me lots of notes and I’d do another draft. I’ve always enjoyed the rewriting process, even with my editors, say I’d do at least three drafts for all my novels. So I really love it when people ask the questions and I come up with more writing and we go back and forth like that. I think I was sort of uniquely lucky in how much of a one-to-one working relationship with the director I was allowed. There was no endpoint to that too, because I’d come and visit set and I’d whisper things in his ear during lunchtime, or he’d email me to say, “We need a few more lines.” There’s no finished point with the script, you just keep on going until the film’s made.

I can imagine once the book was released you had a lot of people vying for the rights. You also mentioned last night at the Q&A that you had emailed Lenny back-and-forth for a while before agreeing to it.

Donoghue: Yeah, he wrote me this ten-page letter – it was amazing. In the film world people are usually cautious, and you hear indirectly through somebody’s agent that maybe they’re a little bit interested. It’s all a bit of a game. People are very careful not to put their cards on the table. They don’t want to expose themselves and say, “I want this.” Whereas Lenny being a less well-known director at the time, he’d only done two films, he wrote me this really honest ten-page letter saying exactly what he felt was going on in the book and I agreed with every word he wrote, and then saying how he’d like to make it into a film and exactly what he would do. He wasn’t talking about casting or money or any of that stuff – he was talking about how he’d use the camera. He basically said, “I want to do it pretty much like the book. I don’t want to make any radical changes to turn it into a more typical Hollywood shaped film.” He was very happy with the two-part structure and the escaping in the middle. He was just not scared of any odd aspects. We had a first meeting and I said, “Is anybody going to die at the end of the film? Because in your first two films somebody dies at the end,” and he said, “No death – I swear!” I asked if he’d keep in the breast-feeding and he said, “I promise!”

Was there a part that you cut out that you wished could have made it into the film, but you knew it wouldn’t work deep down? 

Donoghue: Yeah, there are a few. One part of Ma’s backstory in the book is that stillbirth. I kept that in the script until a very late stage, but at a certain point lots of people felt like it was harking back to an additional tragedy and at that point in the movie we want the journey to be upward, you know? In a book there’s just so much time for little things. In the book when you hear about the stillbirth for a page or two it’s a sad loop, and then you move onto something else, but in a movie you always have to be thinking of the overall story. It could have been a real downer if we brought in more additional sorrow.

Which is kind of what I feel a lot of adaptations just miss. Movies are about the endgame in the story and the linear path to it, versus in a book where you can have so many other things going on, so many extra characters. 

Donoghue: The first thing I did, for instance, was to decide Ma wouldn’t have a brother and his family anymore, because we didn’t need him. It’s enough to be meeting three different grandparent figures.

Versus meeting a brother and his wife and his kids.

Donoghue: Exactly.

So it sounds like you were on set a lot. What’s one of your fondest memories from set?

Donoghue: Well it’s funny, when people are really well known actors you sort of assume they’ll be off in their trailer alone saying, “Don’t talk to me,” you know? So my first day on set I was in the craft services wagon or trailer and I was failed to use the coffee machine. No milk was coming out of the tube. Suddenly there’s Brie Larson beside me saying, “Oh, I know how to fix that,” and she’s getting milk out of the fridge and she’s fixing the coffee machine for me and I thought, “Wow, you’re not putting on any princess airs, are you?” She was just incredibly down to earth and likable and kind. I think when you have a child in every scene everyone has to behave well. You can’t afford for any adults to be childish.

I’ve also noticed outside the film Brie and Jacob have a very close relationship and I think that’s really sweet. Do you feel like this experience created a close relationship with someone, Lenny by any chance?

Donoghue: My closest working relationship was with Lenny, yeah. We had about two years of back-and-forth on the script before anyone else was involved. Also Ed, Ed Guiney, Lenny’s producing partner. They’d been friends since college. Ed is just the opposite of what you’d imagine a producer to be. You kind of imagine producers to be “big ego, big cigar.” Ed is so low key, unobtrusive, and helpful. He’ll run off and get you a cup of coffee. He’ll act like he’s the coffee boy, but he’s running the show. He’s actually an extremely powerful producer now, but he just doesn’t show off at all. He’s always trying to help, facilitate, and get people together in good working relationships. He was a real treat as well.