“The Disaster Artist” — James Franco’s Best Practice Lap Yet!
Franco’s latest effort is a showcase for its highly accomplished cast, a pointless, heartless directorial tour de force that goes nowhere — leaving us wondering, with guarded hope — is James Franco now, finally ready to make a real movie?
In your first month (if not your first week) at film school you’re going to hear one of your instructors ask: “What’s at stake?” Shortly after, you’ll hear the same instructor ask: “How can we raise the stakes?” And if you’re hard working and perceptive enough to succeed in such a desperately competitive business, you’ll find yourself spending the rest of your career asking yourself the same questions:
“What are the stakes and how do I raise them?”
And as you progress you’ll ogle the wreckage as you go by, most often of single films, sometimes of whole film franchises, and sometimes, when the wreck is big enough it will take down entire studios. You’ll nod your head knowingly, smug in the certainty that in each catastrophic case someone, usually more than just one someone forgot to ask these disarmingly simple questions:
“What are the stakes and how do I raise them?”
When these amazingly simple questions go unasked, amazingly simple things tend to go wrong; lovingly produced, finely tuned, exquisitely crafted films (no matter their budgets) hit the big screen, often to the rapturous applause of both industry professionals and professional critics — and immediately hit a box office wall, and go —
— nowhere.
Four weeks into its release, “The Disaster Artist” has grossed just over $16 million, but attention and enthusiasm have waned. In spite of its 92% Fresh critic’s rating, and 90% viewer’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the film peaked weeks ago, and has by now lost over half of its screens. If it can just hang onto a few of the screens that remain for another week or two it might just about break even.
How and why could a film almost universally loved by the industry, the industry’s professional critics and its audience fade to black while making so little money?
“What are the stakes and how do I raise them?”
Unfortunately, there aren’t any, Mr. Franco, and given the nature of your project, you can’t…
Usually, as the cinematic curtain goes up people in the audience wonder what they’re about to see, what’s about to happen, who loves who, who wins, who lives, who dies, and why.
Not so with “The Disaster Artist”. This is a true and reasonably famous story. We go into it knowing how it ends; nobody dies, nobody even gets too upset.
Yes, by the time the curtain comes down we’re greatly impressed at the skills with which the story has been told, but still, we wished for more, we wished something, anything had happened to justify our time and our emotional investment. Did it have to be so true? Couldn’t it have been inspired by, with a liberal dash of…something thrown in to spice it up?
“The Disaster Artist” isn’t so much a story as it is an anecdote, a water cooler tale that doesn’t so much end as it trails off, like a joke without a punch line.
“But it’s a true story!” Yes, it is, but good writers and directors know — true doesn’t always equal cinematic, sometimes it just equals — true, and true is usually…boring.
We’re each and all living true stories, precious few of which ever will, or even deserve to appear on the big screen. Even on our best days, few if any of us live high drama. We don’t save the world, or even save ourselves.
Most of our days go unrecorded and untold, because on most of our days, for almost all of us, almost nothing’s at stake, or the stakes are too low to justify telling anyone— even those closest to us.
“The Disaster Artist”, though curious, is an inconsequential tale of low stakes, more a vignette than a story, and certainly not a dramatic movie.
“The Disaster Artist“ is the multiyear tale of two amateur actors who go to Hollywood, fail to find work, and respond to their lack of professional success by shooting their own movie.
The stakes are completely internal, emotional, and though the characters do eventually express some of these emotions, they only express them verbally.
No one dies, no one is hurt, there are no acts of violence. There can’t be, because it’s a rigidly true story, and the truth wasn’t exciting so much as curious, and we already know how it ends.
The true story and rigidly true film consist of long intervals of very ordinary life (even in Hollywood) that climax in an embarrassing evening.
Were the story not true, it might have seen more success. We might have allowed ourselves to enjoy it more, to wonder at such an incredible tale, to laugh at the antics and foibles and impossibly wooden sensibilities of its characters. But it’s true, so we can’t.
Its middling success is caused by the combination of two things:
- James Franco directed, the cast acted, and the crew filmed the story with such impressive skills, those of us who care about the craft of cinema are compelled to go, we can’t bring ourselves to stay away.
- When faced with appealing, even modestly appealing characters, our mirror neurons force us to experience the story as though we’re living it, as though we are those characters. We hurt when they’re hurt, we’re embarrassed when they’re embarrassed. We can’t laugh at them as the crowd around them does, because we’re them. We can’t enjoy the joke because we’re the butt, in this case the very real butts of one of life’s small, but very real jokes. And so, those not compelled by professional considerations can’t bring themselves to go.
The middling box office is the result.
If the world’s population were film professionals, “The Disaster Artist” would have been one of the year’s biggest hits. It is a tale nearly perfectly produced by an obviously skilled crew and nearly perfectly performed by a dozen talented professional actors: James and Dave Franco, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Paul Scheer, Hannibal Buress, Megan Mullally, Jacki Weaver, Melanie Griffith, Sharon Stone, Zac Efron and — Seth Rogen.
Who knew Seth Rogen could act like anyone other than Seth Rogen? Yes, he still looks and sounds like Seth Rogen, but he’s not playing the usual lazy, inept, stoner, Seth Rogen character. This time he plays a skilled, sane and sensible film professional. (Yes, I realize this may mirror his personal and professional development, so in fact, instead of assuming the dramatic persona of a fictional character, he may still be acting exactly like Seth Rogen. We won’t really know until we see more of him. Watch this space…)
Though Rogen is the most pleasant surprise in the cast, he in no way overshadows the others; they’re so perfect in their roles we forget they’re acting.
We wonder how Franco found actors who look so much like Sharon Stone and Melanie Griffith until we realize they are Sharon Stone and Melanie Griffith, not doing star turns, but playing completely believable supporting characters.
Jacki Weaver pulls us in as the competent, veteran actress wondering what to make of the apparent midfilm disappearance of her subplot.
And we’re right there, beating our unbelieving heads against the wall with Paul Scheer as he deals with the impossibilities dumped in his on screen lap.
The professional cast, play competent industry pros and incompetent rank amateurs equally well. No one disappoints. In each case they convince us instantly they aren’t who we think they are, instead they are the characters they portray on the screen.
In spite of the incredibly strong cast they surrounded themselves with, James and Dave Franco still stand out.
“The Disaster Artist” is their film.
They pull off the toughest job in acting; they play real people acting out real events, and they’re not only convincing as actors, they’re convincing as the subjects of their roles. We know this because at the story’s end they allow us to meet them — the real original cast.
This is absolutely, for several reasons, in the end, James Franco’s best idea.
For almost all of its running time, the film stays true to the cinematic story teller’s art. It stays within its story and keeps that story within the fictional walls of the big screen.
But in a delightful denouement, in its last few moments the film goes meta, and Franco replays scenes acted by his cast alongside the original scenes as played by the original cast from the film which is the object of this crazy little story, “The Room”, and we’re allowed to see how vividly James Franco and his cast and crew have reproduced for us the improbable production of one of the industry’s legendarily bad original films —
— and the just as improbable quirks of the legendarily odd leading characters.
In this case the denouement makes the film. Through it Franco ensures we know what he’s done, exactly what he’s managed to do —he put together a professional cast and crew and turned out a video product with a quality that far outstrips its $10 million budget.
And that, rather than making a conventionally aimed film, may have been his goal — to prove he can be trusted to take a project from conception to completion and produce something professional.
Hollywood isn’t just a place, it’s a business, and like all businesses, it’s out to make a profit. Commonly perceived evidence to the contrary, Hollywood doesn’t hand out money to be lost willy-nilly, it hands out money to those whom it thinks can make a profit.
And James Franco may just have shown Hollywood he can make a profit.
If so, maybe Franco’s next project will be more than a vignette, maybe it will give us an engaging story with stakes we can care about, love and life and death, instead of a well known, tired, worn out water cooler tale of no consequence. Maybe it will have characters that arc, and consequences that capture our emotions instead of our sense of professionalism.
Maybe next time James Franco will make — a real movie!
