Room wants to be a safe place for the unspeakable to become uplifting

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

Boy, everybody sure did love Room when it first arrived. Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel was a made-for-book-clubs hit, greeted by generous sales, critical acclaim and a place on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. Driving the consensus was an impressive narrative achievement: telling a deeply disturbing story through the voice of a 5-year-old.

A beguilingly smart 5-year-old. A heartbreaking 5-year-old. A naggingly precious, supremely chatty, utterly exhausting 5-year-old. Boy, I did not love Room when it first arrived.

I do not love it now that it’s a softened-up movie — one with a beguilingly smart performance by the child actor Jacob Tremblay, and a heartbreaking performance by Brie Larson. Not that Donoghue’s book and the screenplay she has fashioned from it seem meant to be loved, conveying as they do a violent horror and its permanent effects.Yet Room posits maternal love as the reason to scrutinize this horror — one rooted, for an unfortunate few, in real life — as well as the profound avenue by which to transcend it. That’s a lot of mother’s milk to swallow.

Jack (Tremblay), that smart kid, is celebrating his 5th birthday when we meet him, helping the young woman he calls Ma prepare a makeshift cake in the little dwelling they share. They have wakened in the same bed, and Ma has led Jack through a fitness-and-education regimen in their cramped quarters.(In the book, she has also tried and failed, not for the first time, to stop breastfeeding him.) By the end of this hallmark occasion, though, the absence of birthday candles will send Jack into a screaming paroxysm. His day is ruined. But he doesn’t know what ruin really is.

Ma does. Jack has been born to her in captivity, fathered by the man — she and Jack call him Old Nick (Sean Bridgers, looking for a split second like a padded Ryan Reynolds; what a creepy surprise that might have been) — who abducted her seven years before and jailed her in a 100-square-foot garden shed. It’s soundproof and locked electronically from the outside, with only a skylight to let in just enough sun to be cruel. She knows that their space — Room, they call it, a kind of personalization also applied to objects such as Plant — is a cell. Her son’s Sesame Street is her Oldboy — a discretely askew, vacuum-sealed universe. It’s the only world Jack has known, and may ever know, because his mother has shielded him from all that might pain him as she herself has been pained.

This kind of thing, we know, has happened. Abductions, imprisonment and (sometimes incestuous) rape. We know because some of the victims have escaped or been freed. The excruciatingly tense sequence in which Ma attempts to liberate Jack — knowing that she may not get out — is director Lenny Abrahamson’s surest work here. (He last directed Frank, the 2014 movie in which Michael Fassbender played a different kind of prisoner, a papier-mâché-masked avant-punk provocateur.) He lets Tremblay so perfectly capture Jack’s frozen incomprehension at the real world, and his ignorance of the potentially lethal moments ticking by, that the child is, for a few moments, equally piteous and loathsome.

But we know what happens next in such stories, and it’s from this point on that Room slips into drab, predictable territory. Donoghue and Abrahamson have nothing special to say about victimology, about our staring disbelief, our collective inability to imagine, and our culture’s insistence — via TV interviews, via TV re-enactments — on imagining anyway. As Ma recovers her identity as Joy, as someone else’s child, and Jack learns that they are merely two people among countless others, Room devolves into a Spielbergian Law & Order: SVU. (That’s glib, of course, and unfair to Steven Spielberg, probably the greatest director of children in movie history, and to Ice-T, probably the greatest reason to watch post-2001 Dick Wolf in TV history.)

The special thing that Donoghue wants to say, though, is still loud and clear (very loud, when Stephen Rennicks’ naifish, distracting score swells). Remember, we’re talking about motherhood. Room-womb, get it? As Joy at last weans Jack (only figuratively onscreen), she also must reattach to her own mother (Joan Allen, a glowing patience) and set aside the Old Testament coldness of a father (William H. Macy, abused) who sees Jack as a rapist’s bastard, not a grandson. In fact, the special thing that Donoghue all but shouts is a bumper sticker: Jack is a child, not a choice.

In a story that’s already 75 percent metaphor, obviousness like that rings upsettingly hollow. But Room isn’t without power. Its early scenes deftly balance Jack’s wonder at being the world’s only child against the viewer’s mounting claustrophobia. And that same terror of confinement haunts Larson’s face even after Joy is free. That we recognize it later as a fear of knowing only one role — sainted motherhood — in what should be a full and complex life is a credit to the actor more than to the material.

In the novel, Joy is 19 when Old Nick takes her. Here, that age has quietly been reduced to 17, which gives the crime a nastier, more predatory edge while further simplifying the world from which the girl has been spirited. The Joy pictured in school yearbooks that she eventually shares with Jack is an athlete and a popular girl. She’s also, to a not much lesser extent than Jack, a child. She has never voted. She hasn’t gone to college. She hasn’t chosen much, if anything, for herself. She has never spoken up. And when she at last raises her voice, it is to yell at her mother as a teenager might, though what she says is key to Room and its failure. She wonders if she would have been abducted had she not been a nice, helpful person — nice and helpful to the wrong person at the wrong time. Well, fair question, but not very motherly, and so Room moves on, pushing toward sanctimony, toward trite epiphany.

When last we see Jack and Joy, they visit Room one final time, well-guarded and safe but not yet truly free. The mother must let the child choose for himself to leave the womb, rather than, when he asks if they can see Room again, saying no and sitting down with him to binge-watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt until they cry.