Tybout: For the ultimate camp experience, visit ‘The Room’

It’s an oft-stated truism that, compared to the toil of an artistic career, the job of a… It’s an oft-stated truism that, compared to the toil of an artistic career, the job of a critic is cushy and risk free. To compensate, a critic must sometimes lay his credibility on the line by endorsing a controversial work of art. Today, I champion the 2003 cinematic gem “The Room.”

First, a quick disclaimer: I’m not going to contend that “The Room” is at all a good movie. In fact, quite the opposite — I’m here to proclaim, definitively, that “The Room” is the worst film ever made, and for this reason alone, it’s worth our attention.

A bit of background: “The Room” is the pet project of Tommy Wiseau, a man with a jet-black, heavy metal haircut and an accent reminiscent of Eastern Europe, a rare clue to his history as he’s divulged almost no details about his past. When I say pet project, I mean it in an all-encompassing sense that is almost unheard of in today’s movie industry — Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and starred in the film.

To put it kindly, he may have overestimated his expertise.

Originally marketed as a drama in the style of Tennessee Williams’ works, “The Room” tells the story of a love triangle between Johnny, played by Wiseau himself, attempting to be quintessentially American, ­— his fiancee Lisa and his best friend Mark. Or, at least, that’s the official synopsis. In reality, the film is an inexplicable cocktail of promptly discarded narratives ­— breast cancer, a drug dealer named Chris-R — interminable sex scenes and putrid lines that are delivered, more often than not, by the dazed, vaguely draconian director himself: “I did not hit her! I did not! [Pause.] Oh, hi Mark!.”

Among the film’s near infinite flaws, I give you a few highlights: There is no single room of any special relevance; scenes are often punctuated by an establishing shot of a San Francisco landmark — sometimes at a different time of day — before returning to the same bit of action; dialogue is randomly and unnecessarily overdubbed, giving the film a surreal distance; Wiseau’s character gives a strained, mutilated chuckle after nearly every line, regardless of what he’s saying; characters often fall down without explanation; the film schizophrenically employs both an HD and a 35 mm camera because Wiseau was “confused about these two formats;” a man viewers don’t meet until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie lectures characters as if he’s been there all along; even the DVD’s “Behind the Scenes” feature is a bungled misinterpretation of the term, composed almost entirely of eventless shots of the crew setting up.

In a just world, “The Room” would have been smitten from human memory before it could do any lasting damage. But throughout the past several years, screenings have increased exponentially in cities around the world, and the film has been “admired” by everyone from Paul Rudd to Patton Oswalt. I discovered it in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Far from letting its dubious reception deter him, Wiseau attempted to justify the film by pulling a branding 180: “The Room,” he decided, was meant to be funny all along.

This conflict of intent manifests itself most arrestingly in the film’s 30-second teaser, which I encourage all of you to watch on IMDb. In it, two dueling narrators — a somber man who promises us the film has “the passion of Tennessee Williams” and another, much cheerier man who assures us it’s a “quirky new black comedy” — vie for control of the film’s genre, though the dark orchestral score, which Wiseau neglected to eliminate, tips the scales in favor of the former. Intact, however, are the film’s delusions of grandeur — “the best movie of the year!” champions the comedic narrator.

This repositioning is precisely “Room”-esque. It is an ambitious but absurd move that only adds to the sublime feeling of failure engendered when the credits roll.

Last year I celebrated “Troll 2,” another contender in the heated battle for “worst movie ever.” This year, I’ll have to overturn that endorsement. Unlike “Troll 2,” “The Room” is bad in an avant-garde way, and new incompetencies bob to the surface after each viewing. As Tommy Wiseau said in a partly overdubbed interview on the DVD, “You may not like it, but you will learn something.”