Room roams from director's tight rein

Room roams from director's tight rein

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

In Room, Brie Larson plays a mother who raises her five-year-old child in the confinement of a room after she has been kidnapped and locked up by a sex abuser. The scenario here is cinematic and psychological: the "room" represents the entire existence that the boy has known since birth, and the mother-son dynamic is regulated by the physical parameters of the place, which in turn define their perceptions of life. To everyone else, the room is prison. To the boy, it is the world.

Larson, a relative unknown, is now the front-runner to win the Oscar for best actress. It would have been more exciting if Jacob Tremblay, who plays her son Jack, had been nominated too -- in fact this is Jack's story, with his voice narrating and commenting on his state of being to us, and Tremblay is confident, sensitive, without being annoying the way some young actors can be.

The two leads -- and director Lenny Abrahamson -- turn the cramped space of captivity into an emotional elasticity as we see the roller-coaster of mother-son relationship in this unusual circumstance, with Ma (that's what she's known as) in the conflicting modes of motherly protection, guilt, and her relative submission to the man who has abducted her (why, for example, didn't she try to escape before?).

And Room gets our attention as long as we're trapped in that room with them. At midpoint, the inevitable happens: Ma devises an escape plan, and the second half of the film lets the mother and son out to face the real world. Jack has been living in that room all his life, and now he must contend with new faces, new voices, new toys, and new family members. From here Room becomes generic, diluted, almost like a Hallmark series with the troubled family trying to find footing in the chaos around them. The spatial control of the earlier part is stretched out, and the energy sapped from the original idea.

Should Larson win the Oscar -- and I'm sure she will, judging from the wind she's riding -- it's from her complex rendition of a mum forced to grow up and face the complications of the world along with her child. Room is nominated for Best Picture too, and while I'm not surprised, I believe the recognition comes only from its first half, when the small room tells a larger story that sticks with you.

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