Makes a Better Movie Than Book

Rating: 9/10 (11 April 2016)

"Room" is the rare film that improves on the book on which it's based.
I had a complicated reaction to the novel. I found the first half actually set in the room to be nearly unbearable. I'm a father of young boys and trying to imagine the scenario set up in the book made me almost physically ill. I'm not sure I could have read the whole thing if the mother and her son had not escaped from their captor, but once they did, I felt like the air went out of the book and everything that happened after was much less compelling.
The movie spends much less of its time in the room itself, because what takes pages and pages to describe in the book can be conveyed much more quickly with a few carefully chosen images. Therefore, more of the film takes place on the outside, but the filmmakers do a better job of making that the compelling narrative. The movie becomes a tribute to the resilience and adaptability of children, and captures that feeling parents experience when the world and all it contains once again becomes a wondrous place because they're seeing it through the eyes of their children.
Brie Larson won an Oscar for her performance, and while I certainly don't begrudge her the win, I didn't feel that her performance was necessarily the slam-dunk best of the year that her dominance of the awards circuit suggested. The one who amazes in the film is Jacob Tremblay, playing Jack. He carries the film in a way that many adult actors can't manage, and some of the later scenes, especially those with his grandmother (played by a wonderful Joan Allen), quietly reduced me to a quivering mess.
Grade: A