The Disaster Artist (2017) Review

Copyright Fox Searchlight 2017

The first post I made on this site was a review of the 2003 disaster piece The Room, years later a book called The Disaster Artist was written by Greg Sestero (The guy who played Mark in The Room) and it detailed his life while working on The Room and what its like to be Tommy Wiseau's best friend. And now we have a film based on the book starring James Franco, Dave Franco and Seth Rogen. So that's a bad film that spawned a good book that spawned a good film confusing right.

The Disaster Artist sees James Franco play Wiseau and Dave Franco play Sestero, no idea why Sestero couldn't play himself seeing as he's still acting but never mind. The film opens in an acting class in San Francisco in the late 90's this is Sestero's earliest memory of Wiseau and in it Wiseau volunteers to act some Shakespeare and ends up writhing around on a stage while yelling "To be or not to be". This fearlessness inspired something within Sestero to work with Tommy to try and improve his own confidence.

The first thing you notice is that James Franco makes a good Tommy Wiseau it never feels like your watching Franco doing a Tommy Wiseau impression it feels like your watching Wiseau himself. This will have been a difficult thing to pull off considering the 'ahem' distinctive accent Wiseau has.

It never feels like your watching Franco doing a Tommy Wiseau impression it feels like your watching Wiseau himself.

Within the next few scenes we learn that Wiseau wants to go to Hollywood and become a movie star, after a few downright hilarious auditions reels play Wiseau is left feeling like Hollywood doesn't want him, he decides to make his own film called The Room and drags in his friend Sestero to play a leading role.

The bulk of the film happens at this point during the making of The Room and we see just about everything that Sestero described in the book, from Wiseau's private bathroom he had built, to the countless takes it took for Wiseau to deliver the infamous "I did not hit her" line.

At this point you might be wondering if you would get all of the jokes if you had never seen The Room and yes while some of the more inside jokes might wash over you a lot of the humor comes from Wiseau's inability to act or direct and in return the reactions of the stage crew are equally funny especially when Wiseau starts making strange demands.

The final scene of the film show the films opening night, and while Wiseau introduced it as a drama more and more people started to laugh at it causing Wiseau to become upset. Sestero tells him that his film is affecting people in different ways but their still enjoying it and he returns to the screening where he takes a bow after his newly re branded black comedy ends.

This is my biggest issue with the film, you see in real life the film was almost ignored when it came out and it took years of midnight screenings around the world to build up the huge fan base around the film we have today, I just wish the film had shown this rather than making it look like it shot to cult classic status overnight.

In conclusion this is a film for admittedly a small audience, but I can almost guarantee that you will never see another film like it, while Wiseau's failures as an actor and director are played for laughs the film is also strangely inspiring, its shows that a man who Hollywood didn't want can make a movie a success, even if it didn't turn out quite how they expected.