Book vs. Movie: Room
By Ben Gruchow
February 4, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Room
Room is told from the point of view of a five-year-old named Jack, who lives with his Ma in a place he calls simply "Room." Every aspect of their lives is carried out in this place; there is running water and plumbing and food, but not much, and there is no way to leave. A frequent visitor is a man Jack calls Old Nick, who provides them food and has an odd relationship with Ma. We are gradually introduced to the concept that Room, and their placement in it, is less innocuous than it may initially seem; at a certain point, Ma tells Jack the story of how she was kidnapped seven years ago by Old Nick and brought there under anesthesia, and she had him while in Room. This coincides with a plan she has for them to escape…something not easy when Room is soundproofed, locked and unlocked by code, and located somewhere neither of its occupants have ever seen. The novel is told in the first-person, past-tense.
The Book
Given the choice of narrator, Emma Donoghue’s Room has a benefit unique to its medium; this is, of course, assuming you are reading it without having seen a plot description or the trailer for the movie adaptation. The benefit is that we are introduced to five-year-old Jack and his mother, Ma, on a purely isolated basis; we meet them without knowing any of the more sinister details of their life or environment. It’s a good while before we come to realize that the Room the two of them live their entire lives in is in fact a highly-modified garden shed, soundproofed and locked from the outside. “Old Nick,” as Jack calls him, is more than just an occasional provider of groceries and goods; he’s a rapist who kidnapped Ma seven years prior, drugged her, and has kept her inside the shed ever since. Jack has no knowledge of the outside world; to keep the horror of the situation buried, Ma educates him from birth that only what’s inside Room is real, and everything else only exists for their TV shows.
This is bleak material, cushioned only by the guileless way that it’s presented; Jack, after all, knows these surroundings as his entire world, so much of Room is presented in a way that is sometimes positive and comforting, sometimes negative, but always familiar and normal. This also has the effect of expanding the size and scope of Room to the reader’s eyes; we’re told that the space is roughly 10 feet square, sure, but the constant description in the sense of it being a world rather than a confinement gives us a feeling after a point like the space occupied is far bigger than it really is.
The turning point of the book’s first half comes when Jack wakes up one morning to find his Ma “gone” - in a kind of temporary catatonia. Jack witnesses a live mouse going in and out of Room through a hole in the kitchen wall. When she wakes up, Ma tells him - and us - about the real nature of their life, and how she came to be there. We have received hints and indications about a would-be older sibling to Jack that died either in the womb or during infanthood, and this passage of the novel makes that development clear.
It’s also where we arrive at a critical juncture; now that Jack has been exposed to the true nature of Room, and now that we know he knows, the novel needs to re-orient itself. It does so at about the right time, if not slightly past its welcome; we have just about reached the point where Jack’s convincing but relatively two-dimensional narration of this world has crossed the line from intriguing to monotonous when Ma hatches her plan to get the two of them out of Room forever by using Jack as a decoy.
The details of their escape attempts are more technical than anything else, but the actual sequence itself - it does no good to continue without revealing that, yes, Ma and Jack do escape Room - is notable for how well it transitions Old Nick. To this point, he’s been mostly an abstract, heard-but-not-seen figure, and the escape sequence does a slick job of transitioning him into a tangible threat and antagonist without announcing itself in doing so. I especially liked the unceremonious exit of the character; there’s no big struggle or absolution given, and such a move would have probably undercut what follows in the story. Instead, we’re only told of a retreating vehicle.
The second half of Room starts with Ma and Jack in a clinic being rehabilitated while much of the world watches them on TV and marvels at their story. It abandons much of the externalized conflict that drove the first half, and examines the impact of seven years in isolation and imprisonment on both Ma and Jack from a mental and emotional point of view. This is where we’re introduced to Ma’s own parents, still fairly young, and to ideas as far as what may be in store for both of the main characters as they attempt to readjust to a world that’s far less understandable and controllable than Room.
The Book
Room, the book, is an introverted and subjective thing. Since it’s entirely told from Jack’s point of view, we are given two fairly distinct outlooks on the world, depending on whether we’re reading a pre-escape passage or a post-escape passage. In the second half of the book, which is less eventful but more compelling psychologically than the first, we’re exposed mostly to the expressions of confusion, grief, and homesickness as manifested by an intelligent and perceptive child who doesn’t know what any of these things mean.
This kind of tabula rasa approach is what gives sequences like Jack’s first trip outside of the clinic and his abbreviated trip to a mall the kick that they do. He experiences the sensations of these psychological states in something of a vacuum; we the reader understand what the character is feeling, but he doesn’t, and he doesn’t know how to communicate the very unique form of affection and homesickness for Room that he has to anyone else. When he tries, they’re uncomprehending. We, then, are the sole other being besides Ma in the story’s universe that knows what’s going on, and we’re powerless to do anything about it on Jack’s behalf.
Much of the emotion of the characters, and most of the conflict in the book, stems from the tendency of Ma and Jack to either attempt to or insist on defining the entirety of the world despite lacking critical, crucial knowledge, and suppressing curiosity about investigating what that missing knowledge is. This is eminently a protective and defensive move by Ma toward Jack as a five-year-old; he’s led to believe not that the outside world is inaccessible, but that there is no such thing at all. TV programs, food and drink, money, toys, furniture - they all exist for the sole purpose of sustaining Ma and Jack’s existence in Room.
What we have here, then, is a story about how intimidating knowledge can be: it indirectly depicts one possible outcome of a person with fundamentally limited knowledge and experience having their parameters of normalcy abruptly challenged (and in many cases, contradicted). This is why the exposure to the larger world affects Ma to the same degree that it does Jack, albeit in a different way; her occasional disappearances into herself are a fairly straightforward manifestation of PTSD, and this part of the book is at pains to establish how illusory the sense of self and self-control is, and how dependent it is on a familiar perspective.
We’ve seen this before in stories that involve complex and corrupted relationships between parent and child; what makes the events in the novel different (and more potent) is the cause of the insularity being something that both participants are consciously aware of, and attempting to overcome. Another major factor that’s present here is the sense of emotional disconnect; it’s there in the first half, mostly from Ma, but it’s pervasive in the second half, and we get that emotional disconnect from Ma’s entire family. The characters of her parents are not merely inserted into the story for support and convenience. Instead, there is the sense that the woman back in their lives is more a stranger than their daughter, and that each individual person here is involved in a complicated unspoken dance where certain things can’t be stated outright, only alluded to. All of this is given to us secondhand via Jack’s narration, but it’s indisputably there. This sense of interpersonal tension and caution gives the payoff of the novel, involving Room itself, an additional heft beyond what we get from the direct impression that Jack gives us.
The Movie
Both versions of Room make Jack’s age a major point. As both iterations start, he’s just celebrated his fifth birthday; Old Nick finds out, and Jack wakes up one morning to find a new R/C truck waiting for him. The movie adaptation of Room frames this in a revelatory way: Jack wakes up, looks off-screen, and we see his reaction shot. When we reveal the R/C truck, it’s sitting on the tiny kitchen table in the foreground, just barely in focus. Our attention, though, is on Ma. She’s looking at Jack, not at the truck - she knows he sees it - and the expression on her face is one of unhappy resignation.
In that moment, actress Brie Larson communicates notes of the Ma character that were left to implication in the novel and unexplored thus far in the film, with resentment toward Jack for his own species of ignorant contentedness in Room (and resentment toward herself for enabling it) being a primary driver. Ma is physically protective of Jack in both iterations of the story, but this stretch of the film alludes to subtle shadings of motivation for that protection. It’s not out of line to suggest that the escape plan Ma hatches, shortly after the unveiling of the gift, is derived in part from that resentment.
It’s a powerfully ambiguous moment, at any rate, that shot of the R/C car with Ma sitting behind it, and the movie adaptation of Room flips the script on effectiveness: the portion of the film taking place in Room is something of a masterstroke in camera placement and production design, while the second half gives back much of the novel’s perceptiveness about worldview. It’s pretty surprising how closely the movie hews to the book, and yet how similar sequences wear very differently on screen.
That first half, though, is just about unimpeachable. One of the biggest obstacles of this adaptation had to have been interpreting what is narrated to us in written form as a limitless world in a concrete, very limited visual sense. What the movie’s director Lenny Abrahamson and cinematographer Danny Cohen have done is utilize focus, exposure, and point of view to deny us a definitive sense of Room’s scope and size for as long as possible. Given that the set (and Room itself) is only about ten feet by ten feet in size, they succeed to a remarkable degree. This direction is paired with Jacob Tremblay’s voiceover, narrating Jack’s perception of Room and the world in several passages that are lifted almost directly from the novel.
The elliptical nature of this narration not only works better than you’d expect, but it actually acquits itself more comfortably in the cinematic sense than it does in the written sense. Witness the passage of a normal day in the Room life of Ma and Jack - a breakfast of counting cereal pieces, physical exercise of going from one side of Room to the other, of jumping up and down and screaming up at Room’s skylight, which provides the sole source of sunlight. This is very loyal in a strict sense to the book, but it’s stunning how Abrahamson manipulates our perception of space and re-contextualizes Room according to each activity, while also never trying to hide what a limited space we’re working with.
The escape sequence and rescue in the film is also a good deal more powerful and immediate than it is in the novel, and I attribute that to a change in time. The book’s escape took place at night; vivid in prose, but not great fodder for a direct translation into the visual. I have no doubt that Abrahamson could have made a nighttime escape work, but what we get instead is a brilliant sequence set during the afternoon.
Old Nick believes Jack to be dead due to illness; Ma has rolled him inside of Room’s only rug and instructed him not to move. What we are given, then, is a chain of events seen mostly from Jack’s very restricted point of view as he’s carried out of Room, put into the bed of Old Nick’s truck, and driven off to be buried. Jack’s been prepared for unrolling the rug from within, so he can jump off the truck and alert whoever he sees. But Abrahamson pauses here, as Jack slowly unrolls himself (in a single overhead tracking shot as the truck drives down the road) and he’s exposed to the color saturation and light saturation of a fall day; he sees a tree for the first time, and the sky, and clouds. The soundtrack here is something, too; the combination of music and incidental sound is effectively unimprovable. The entire sequence is breathtaking.
Events that follow shortly afterward, involving Joan Allen and William H. Macy as Ma’s parents, are similarly impactful. But the narrative does take a considerable step back in urgency and emotional immediacy as we settle into a long recovery process for Ma and Jack. It’s appropriate to the subject matter, but it creates a perception of narrative drift that really wasn’t there in the novel, and this part of the movie also takes a hit for simplifying some of the complex feelings insinuated by Ma’s parents in the source material. If there’s a tradeoff to this simplification, it’s that it draws a much clearer emotional line to a late-in-the-film incident wherein Larson is taken out of the principal story, and Jack’s recovery begins the final part of its arc.
The Verdict
Both versions of Room contain potent illustrations of pessimism and optimism in the face of trauma, and neither one is cheap enough to suggest that a recovery from such trauma is easy or guaranteed. The source novel provides us with a second half that makes this point with greater articulation; the movie sacrifices some of the articulation for gentleness of approach. However, I find myself realizing that the first half of the film works slightly better as cinema than the second half of the novel works as prose, and it’s such a lopsided balance between the movie and the book when it comes to that first half that it’s no contest in that regard. And really, that first half is the critical part of the story; without it, we have a muted short story about recovery without enough in the way of incident to qualify it as a total success. The cinematic version of Room, at least, fulfills that requirement to a greater degree.
Book vs. movie winner: Movie.