When discussing dark stories of kidnaps and psychological turmoil, it is often easy to get stuck in the darkness of its subject. How could you not when it's perceived as an event devoid of laughter and joy. While this isn't the entire reasoning behind Emma Donoghue's sometimes clever "Room," it's enough of an entry point to understanding why she chose to explore a sad story from the unlikeliest of protagonists: a young boy who never knew anything outside of Room: a toolshed in the backyard of a man who holds him as his Ma captive. The results are searing with emotion, but one has to question if it also doesn't have a bit too much limitation in this approach, managing to sound twee and tonally misguided. While that is true in small doses, Donoghue's final product shows an emotional growth that isn't just symbolic of breaking out of a terrible situation but finding a boy experiencing a new phase of his life, learning to let go and embrace the new. It's frustrating while heartwarming, creating an odd mix of satisfying results.
One could argue that Jack is intentionally annoying because he's a five-year-old whose only friends exist on a TV. He has a lengthy relationship with Dora the Explorer, believing that she comes to visit without a schedule. He plays in the claustrophobic space, acting like it's the greatest place on Earth. It's in part because he doesn't know better. It's also because of Ma, who is doing everything to give him a productive life even as she suffers from depression. Because Jack doesn't know what depression is, she can only describe her as being distant or not being able to be there for him.
It's here where things become a bit ingenious. The film's ability to analyze abuse through the eyes of a child has the potential to give away innocent views on something complicated. As a result, the limited jargon allows for something more abstract to be at play, for Jack's innocence to shine through in the face of turmoil that he's probably not going to fully understand for another decade. He's all so blase about things, and it makes things more heartbreaking, especially since you know he has no wherewithal to help his mother through things. It's not that he doesn't care. It's just that he is too young to know what pain she is feeling. He doesn't know about the adult world even as he stares at it, pretending to play games in order to find a new form of freedom.
The first half is especially frustrating. While Donoghue does an effective job of setting up the mundanity of this world, it's difficult to say that it's as endearing as she thinks. The longer that you spend with Jack going through the motions, the more that you want the next phase of the story to happen, where you're not trapped in crass languages, such as detailed accounts of his bathroom routine and constant obsession with his genitals. He is a child, after all, and at a certain point its redundancy goes beyond establishing tone and gets annoying, especially as his word choice becomes reused in ways that are more designed to be cute than helpful.
It's when the story gets to the second and third act that things begin to pick up and become more interesting, finding Ma's struggles being explored in a greater context. It gets dark towards the middle, with severe depression and the concept of battered wife playing more prominently into the script. While there's plenty to like in how Jack observes the new world, it's more interesting in how it explores the idea of a child learning to grow and have an acceptance for the outside world. It's when he's finally able to appreciate what's around him, and it's symbolic of something more universal. It just happened to be put into a very strange situation that he thankfully got out of. One can be thankful that, as mentioned in the book, he will forget about this moment as he grows older. He will learn to be happier and let go of childish things that tie him to this event. It's heartwarming in that way, finding a family becoming normalized.
It's a decent book that often achieves a brilliant new form of prose in its child narrator. However, it does have limited appeal at other points, meaning that your appreciation for a spousal abuse story through the eyes of a child may be limited. It works in the grand scheme, but the Room scenes are a bit overlong, and not always with intention, and it does wear on the reader who may find the grammatical decisions a bit off-putting. It works at something inventive because of its look at child development, but otherwise, it is a hit and miss book that is worth checking out but only for those who have the power to reach through the sluggish parts to find the beauty on the other side.
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