Room

And the winner of the Moving to Oz Award goes to........ ........Room!  What I love about this movie is that even though the circumstances are horrifying, the focus of the movie is on life, not death or horror. It would remind you of Life is Beautiful, where Roberto, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, is sent to a Nazi concentration camp with his son, and he uses his imagination to build a fantasy world, a safe culture, for his son, shielding him from the horrors going on around him. He shifts his son to Oz. The little guy believes it’s all a game. That movie won three Academy Awards. My guess is that Room will be well awarded, too.

In Room, the mother builds a life for her five year-old son in the tiny room where they are imprisoned, filling his life with the characters that he greets every morning (“Good morning, Sink. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Rug.” If you are a mom, you are hearing, “Goodnight, Moon.”) She educates him, plays with him, entertains him, and shields him from the evil she suffers. Like Roberto, she creates a safe culture for her son. I think that is the draw of the movie, being able to watch a brave young woman move her son out of her own personal hell to Oz, being able to look in on the culture she creates for him, as if we were foreigners peeking into her Room from the skylight above. The movie makes this alien culture as rich and intriguing as any exotic destination by letting us see it through Jack’s eyes, for whom this 12 foot square room, so familiar, so mundane, is his entire world. The book dwells far more than the movie on the rich world the mom weaves for her son, though she’s not the clown that Roberto is, and not always so cheerful. She has her Gone Days, when her eyes go blank, and Jack is left on his own. She’s more vulnerable, her courage more palpable. Modern audiences expect more rounded characters, even flawed one. Just watch the news.

Of course, we are all rounded characters, flawed, failing. We are all called to create another culture in the “Room” we live in. This is an act of faith. It is the Kingdom of God. It’s invisible like the wind in the trees, but it is a true story we tell to those around of us of the goodness of God. How can we notice “Sink” and “Chair” and “Rug” today? How can we look up at Skylight and wonder at what “Outside” holds? Perhaps the high point of the movie for me is when the Mom struggles to persuade Jack that there really is a world Outside bigger than Room and just as Real. When he was four, she had taught him that nothing he saw on the television was real. Only what he saw around him was Real. But now that he was five, he was ready to be taught the truth. That there really are Dogs and Cats beyond the fuzzy television screen’s projections. Jack rejects the idea at first. It’s mind boggling. But then he succumbs to the beauty of the idea and trusts her and believes. He matures. 

This step of faith is necessary for their escape from evil. Faith in God is always a step of maturity.

Lewis wrote about this process of maturing toward faith in his own life in the book Surprised by Joy. You have to be a child to go through it. You have to be reborn. You have to take it on trust. You have to take the scraps of evidence, like the brown leaf fallen on the skylight (“But tree leaves are green, Mom”) and run with them, and that takes courage because Room, here, is so much more real than that brown leaf there, Outside. No matter how obvious it seems to us, no matter how confidently we believe in Outside, that isn’t proof enough. It always takes faith.

What kind of Outside do we paint for those around us? How do we teach them to escape? How do we prepare them to appreciate Outside by first teaching them to appreciate Room? How do we make Outside convincing when they are persuaded that Room is all there is? How do we teach them what is truly Real?

And that’s why my kids don’t take me to the movies. “Mom, will you just watch the movie!”