Films > Film Reviews
The Disaster Artist
Cinema City
10/12/17
Welcome to The Disaster Artist: a very good bio about a very bad movie, featuring some excellent impersonations of some truly awful acting. James Franco tackles the extraordinary story of human caricature Tommy Wiseau: the writer, director, producer and star of the cult phenomenon The Room.
Franco has taken Wiseau’s weird clay features and moulded them into something hysterical and tragic, enigmatic but clownish. He has breathed fire into an enigma and done the unthinkable, make Wiseau human (ish). It’s not quite a parody and not entirely a homage, but something in between that seems to have been made equal parts from mockery and admiration.
The flick features an amazing physical transformation by Franco, who seems to have captured and bottled the very essence of Wiseau, bringing him to life (in so much as anyone who looks like they were sculpted from white cheese can be lifelike). With Stela directing (kudos again to Franco) and a razor-sharp script, this has undoubtedly landed itself a place as one of the best and most entertaining biopics in a long time. With The Disaster Artist, you get several Francos for the price of one. In this, his first professional collaboration with his brother, Dave Franco delivers an incredible performance as Wiseau's confused and reluctant best friend Greg Sestero. They are, as a Franco-sceptic, I must admit, a riot to watch.
There was always the risk that documenting the life of the Madame Tussauds-esque Tommy Wiseau would turn into an overblown farce with less substance than a soufflé, but the result is actually a bizarrely moving and empowering story, whose success is just as unlikely and remarkable as that of The Room. Indeed, there are an uncanny number of parallels between Franco and Wiseau's unorthodox careers - Franco is often discredited for his high-brow films and praised for his trashy ones, and the fact that he is a good/bad actor playing a bad/good actor adds a new dimension to an already meta filo pastry of a movie.
No stranger to cameo fests, it was hard to imagine how Seth Rogen (playing Tommy’s script supervisor) and Franco were going to top This Is the End, but they’ve served us yet another cameo circus that seems to have scooped up half of Hollywood and dumped them down its beautiful cinematic garbage chute.
At the screening, a rare thing happened. The cinema audience, normally a calm, considerate, orderly selection of individuals became a rabble of rowdy animals. Laughing manically, we clapped and whooped and generally made enough noise to raise the roof. The cinema had transformed into live theatre. Few films can claim to have had such a hold over its audience and there was the sense that what we were watching was fresh and risky and more of an event than a movie.
Strangely, the film’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Whilst the endless splurge of meta humour and in-jokes are back-achingly funny, it is that exact same ‘nudge nudge wink wink, see how clever what we’re doing here is?’ layers of irony and self-awareness that sometimes jars and in bits makes for tedious and predictable viewing. The Disaster Artist is the victim of its own success as much as it is the success of its own success.
Despite its shortcomings, The Disaster Artist remains so utterly outrageously excellent and ludicrously cleverly stupid that you will laugh yourself silly and develop a strange desire to throw plastic spoons at the screen.
7/10