Read

The first half of production for Room (2015) took place in a 10’ x 10’ space, recreating the dimensions of the tiny garden shed in which the film’s main characters, 5 year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) and his Ma (Brie Larson), are held captive. Walking into a film about kidnapping and rape, we are prepared to experience something harrowing and bleak. But Room is, while painful and heartbreaking, equally full of joy and warmth. Our introduction to the tiny space itself (which Jack calls simply “Room”) reveals that mother and son have created an inviting, happy world, in spite of all the circumstances making this a seemingly impossible feat.

This light side of the film is thanks to Ma’s strength in presenting a positive face toward Jack while repressing her darkest thoughts and fears. In many ways, the success of the film hinges on the power of Larson’s performance for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. As director Lenny Abrahamson told The Telegraph, “Brie has this very special quality, which is that she can go to these very dark and emotionally raw places, but she does it with such simplicity and grace… There’s no showboating. There is just a truthfulness and an honesty about the performance.”

We feel included Larson’s warmth and openness toward Jack, and we participate in Jack’s enjoyment of the small yet rich world his mother enables within the tiny shed where he spends the first five years of his life. Larson’s approach to the role involved methodical research and rational thought. “I broke her down into little pieces,” she told The A.V. Club. “I spoke with a trauma specialist about the sexual abuse and what would happen to a mind after you’ve been stuck in that space for seven years. Because it’s different than, say, a week in. You’d start to normalize some stuff.” Larson felt it was important to understand the small details of what the situation would be like, down to the physiological effects of staying in one room for seven years, in order to create a sense of reality to her performance: “I spoke with a nutritionist about the lack of vitamin D, about not having a toothbrush, not being able to wash your hair or face, lack of nutrition, and what that might look like. From there, I was able to find the fact in it, and then I could find a way to relate to it.”

One of Larson’s great achievements in Room is turning her struggle into a challenge to which any parent can relate. As she continued to The A.V. Club, “What I didn’t want with this story was for people to be watching it and getting a satisfying voyeuristic view into a crazy situation. As you watch it, it becomes much more universal… you don’t feel like it’s a crazy situation that happened to one person. You feel like, metaphorically, you can relate it to an experience in your own life.”

Abrahamson told Phoenix Film Festival that Larson’s character “has two definite faces. She has the face that she turns towards Jack, which is reassuring, which is fun and one which tells him all the time that nothing is wrong and everything is okay, and then you have the face when he is not looking at her. You feel what she is really going through. We all do that with our kids. We create a bubble around them, we are warm and we are as optimistic as we can be, even when stuff is going wrong in our lives. I think what is fascinating is that bubble is never complete. I think, very quickly, kids do sense the shadows in their parents’ lives. It is a slow process of the demythologization of moving to the reality, the complexity and the shadowiness of the adult world.”

Abrahamson and Larson have both acknowledged the practical challenges of shooting within the small space. As Larson told The Telegraph, “‘It was exhausting for the crew to shoot in so confined a space, and you could really feel the momentum in the room, of us all desperately wanting to get out…That sense of confinement was real.” But director Abrahamson has also said he found the parts of the film within Room easier to shoot, on an emotional and intellectual level, than the later sequences, and Larson continued to The AV Club that these parts were easier to perform: “we shot pretty much in chronological order, and so I saw from Ma’s perspective that being in Room was gonna be the easiest that it ever was… At that point, she’s suppressing everything… She’s numb to what’s going on. It’s not until she’s at home in a safe place that everything starts to come to the surface… All the crew was excited to get out of Room because we were all stepping on each other and getting in each other’s way. So there was this anticipation, like, ‘Once we get through the escape sequence, this’ll all be so much better!’ But in my head, I was thinking, ‘No, not for me, at least.’ We were shooting in Toronto on-location in negative-whatever temperatures, doing night shoots, getting snowed in, not able to get home because of blizzards. And while all this was happening, Ma’s coming to terms emotionally with what’s happening to her.”

Ma’s role was greatly expanded from Emma Donoghue’s source novel to the film, whose screenplay Donogue also wrote. The medium of film requires Ma to be onscreen in most scenes, whereas the novel is limited to Jack’s POV, so the filmmakers knew immediately that Ma would be a bigger part of the film. Abrahamson told MoveableFest that “it’s the nature of the book that you glimpse Ma, and you get a sense everything’s not as rosy as Jack thinks it is, but nevertheless, she remains over there at some distance from you since it’s told from his perspective… But what [novelist and screenwriter] Emma and I recognized right from the beginning was that this is going to be much more of a two-hander, because she’s there [in the frame]... you metaphorically take the lens cap off and you can direct the audience’s attention, using editing, using different shot sizes and shot per shot, the world floods in. We knew that Ma had to be built to be really three-dimensional. She couldn’t be a sketch and so much of who Ma is a version of Brie. If you cast another actor, you have a different Ma and a different film. Characters are not cut-outs into which you stick bricks. A character should be – if they’re going to be interesting at all – some extraordinary amalgam of the written and the lived.”

Donoghue told Time about first finding Larson to play Ma: “The director said to me, ‘We have to find someone warm and kind.’ I think Short Term 12 [Larson’s previous film] really was an outstanding performance. [Brie’s] kind of generosity and naturalness with the young actors in that film, even though they’re teenagers rather than children, unearthed that fact that she was the right person for this job.”

Donoghue also noted that Larson took on something of a mothering role in her off-camera relationship with young Tremblay. In down moments, the actress subtly guided her young co-star, making him feel comfortable throughout the process. “If the camera stopped rolling, he’d be joking with her,” Donaghue said. “I saw her do a lot of gentle coaching with him. Not so much about emotions, but just saying ‘Oh, let’s tuck that curl behind your ear!’ or ‘Straighten your back!’ Jacob did astonishing work, but it’s partly because of the low-key and generous direction he got from Lenny [Abrahamson], who’s a father of two small children, and the direction he got from Brie.”

The key to the early sequences in Room is that we, like Jack, don’t sense that his early childhood is unhappy or unfulfilled. As Abrahamson said in his interview with Phoenix Film Festival, Jack “is not aware that he is missing anything, and that allows him to make the absolute most out of the small amount of stuff that he has. I think we learn something as parents from this, which is we obsess about our children’s lives. We want them to do all of these extracurricular activities, we obsess whether they are watching too much TV, whether they have enough music lessons, and all this stuff that we get into as parents, and most of which has very little bearing. Mostly it’s just about providing them with love and a sense of safety, and kids can do the rest with very, very minimal resources… This film says to you, ‘Well, there is probably a tremendous amount (of goodness) in the life you’re leading. If you just calm down and take a look at it, it is wonderful.’ I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind.”

Given its subject matter, we may be surprised that Room can offer us lessons on good parenting. What’s undeniable, though, is that Larson’s performance teaches us about the strength and generosity of spirit that motherhood demands, especially as we live through our darkest moments.