Room was touching, heart-warming, gripping, wow

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2016)

Room is the story about 5 year old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) and his mother Ma (Brie Larson) who are a typical loving mother and energetic son filled with curiosity and imagination in an anything but typical situation. They are both living, surviving, trapped in a 10 by 10 foot space that Ma has called Room in her best efforts to protect Jack from the absolutely unthinkable nightmare that is the only life he has ever known, a life she isn't sure will ever be anything else. However, miraculously, through Ma's ingenuity and guts and Jack's courage, one day, they escape. With their 10 x 10 Room behind them, they face a new world (literally) of hopes, possibilities, challenges and fears. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch Room or Spotlight next with the Oscars upon us, but a good friend of mine, Steve Williams, strongly recommended Room. I'll be watching Spotlight next, but thank you to Steve for the recommendation. It was powerful. Larson has had supporting roles in Trainwreck, The Gambler and Don Jon along with multiple TV appearances, but this is her first leading role and she also looks right at home. In fact, her performance has not only earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but many critics are predicting she will go home with the win and after watching the movie, it would be an award well-deserved. Room opens on Jack's 5th birthday. We find out later that Ma was abducted 7 years earlier and Jack was born and raised in Room. Her abductor makes regular visits (conjugal in nature) with Jack tucked away in Wardrobe. We already know from the preview that they do eventually escape and are given a chance to have a life outside Room, so that's not a spoiler there. I won't give it all away, but the escape will leave you breathless with white knuckles as you cling to whatever you have nearby. I really only had two minor issues with the movie. First, after she is reunited with her parents, Ma is unsettled to discover they had split and her mother (Joan Allen) had met a new man. Her father (William H. Macy) flies home to be there for the reunion, but quickly leaves and can't even look at Jack or address him. And then we don't see him again and are left wondering what happened.
The second minor issue I had was that the preview uses part of its limited time to share a scene after their escape between Jack and Ma in which Jack is concerned about their abductor finding them again. Ma reassures him that it will never happen. And it doesn't come up again at all. It's handled just fine in the movie, but the issue is that the preview seemed to indicate it would be a factor in the aftermath. It wasn't. The aftermath of adjusting to the real world was dramatic enough as it was and didn't need to be in the preview.
Room is a touching, heart-warming, intense, gripping, original and well-acted and well-told story that I thoroughly enjoyed. I predicted a solid 4 stars: worth the money in the theatre, worth watching again, and has a good chance of making it to my home collection, and that's exactly what I'm sticking with.
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