It’s hard to talk about the miniseries with actor Tom Holland called Crowded Room, which can be seen in the video library of Apple TV+. Almost nothing can be revealed about its topic in advance.
The Crowded Room was loosely inspired by the bestselling novel by a telling name by the American writer Daniel Keyes from 1981. It was recently published by the Argo publishing house in a translation by Jiří Hanuš. According to this book about a real, now-dead man, Netflix last year filmed documentary series. A film adaptation was considered several times, as directors James Cameron or David Fincher were considered, Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to play the main role.
However, just describing what the prose is about would reveal the concept of the series. At the same time, the creators keep it a secret until the second half of the ten-part story.
American screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, winner of the Oscar for biographical drama Pure soul, is much more secretive than Keyes the writer. He does not hide from the first pages that the hero of the book has been diagnosed with a mental disorder. Although the majority of the text consists of a dialogue between two people sitting in a room, the protagonist is in such a unique state that the unfolding of the different levels of his personality continues to be attractive. On the contrary, the series hides the essentials to its own detriment. There is a big hole in the middle of the script, and for a long time it is not clear where the characters’ looping conversations are going, or why we should listen to them.
The protagonist Danny’s memory is similarly leaky. The young man with the bad haircut is played by Tom Holland, known as Spider-Man. It’s 1979 and Danny is pulled over by the police after pulling a loaded gun from a paper bag in the middle of New York. Apparently with intent to kill. He didn’t have the courage to fire. Nevertheless, the detectives consider him a serial killer and he is threatened with many years in prison.
A woman named Rya, convinced that his case is more complex, becomes the hope for the frightened young man. Others refer to the character played by Amanda Seyfried as a professor. Although her specialty is pretty clear from the type of questions she asks Danny, we’re probably supposed to feign surprise when we finally learn exactly what she does for a living a few episodes in.
Sasha Lane as Ariana and Tom Holland as Danny. | Photo: Apple TV+
Rya visits Danny in a building that could be both a prison and a mental institution. He tries to understand his short circuit. And it takes a lot of time. Since puberty, when the hero was “sad and moody”, he did not get along very well with his peers and constantly tested the patience of his parents, as can be seen from the flashbacks interspersed with his chats with Ryo.
Gradually, new people begin to appear in the protagonist’s life. Always on call. For example, when he needs to hide marijuana from the school principal or defend himself against bullying.
A nearby abandoned house becomes a new refuge for him and a group of friends. The central figure of the local strange community is the taciturn Israeli hulk Yitzchak. Danny sees him as his protector from dubious individuals from the street and his stepfather. Apart from Yitzchak, he spends a lot of time with his hot-blooded friend Ariana, who was supposed to be his accomplice during the initial attack. However, since Danny is an unreliable narrator, the audience cannot be sure of any of this.
Whether he’s making it up or telling the truth, his narration is as somnambulistic as Tom Holland’s expression. In the first episodes, the 27-year-old actor resembles a man who has just woken up from a deep sleep. Because at this time, the creators are still hiding key information from us, which would add another dimension to the scenes, for a long time we only watch the execution of banal incidents from the coming of age of a juvenile delinquent, in which there is nothing special from the point of view.
Autobiographical facts that could be summarized in 15 minutes take almost five hours in the series. We learn unnecessary details about how Danny dated or bought drugs, but his personality continues to resemble a blank slate and the investigation of the initial incident does not move forward. The other characters, characterized by a few stereotypical features, seem equally distant, absent in spirit.
In retrospect, the approach chosen by the creators partially sheds light on the “big revelation”, which, however, comes too late and cannot make up for the dullness of most of the preceding scenes.
If the characters are flat and unreadable on purpose, the creators could have occupied the audience with something other than shallow psychology. But that didn’t work out. Most of the first five episodes of The Crowded Room are word fluff. Different people chat aimlessly. One conversation brings back memories of another, equally uninteresting. Over and over and in the same tone. Although directed by talented filmmakers Kornél Mundruczó and Brady Corbet, the style is repetitive and most scenes lack atmosphere.
The decision to make a long-delayed twist on the theme of the book would make sense if the series functions as a psychological detective story, in which we uncover the identity of a mysterious character instead of a crime. However, the creators do not manage to do that either. They draw attention to Danny’s secret with overly instructive “I didn’t do it myself” lines. The slowness and caution with which they dispense the pieces of a predictable puzzle acts as a mockery to the audience.
At the same time, thanks to narratively complex films, the audience is like Fight Club, Sixth Sense or Mulholland Drive long accustomed to reading between the lines, and the resulting picture will probably form long before the revelation of the would-be shocking point. It’s more of a point blank click than a shot. When the writers finally free their hands and stop hiding what has been obvious for a long time, they at least speed up the lost pace and Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried finally have something to play.
Amanda Seyfried as Rya and Tom Holland as Danny. | Photo: Apple TV+
It wouldn’t hurt the series if it relied more on the ambiguous dynamics of the main actors from the beginning and less on sentimental flashbacks. They just dilute the plot and reduce the persuasiveness of Danny’s psychological portrait. At the same time, it should be primarily about him.
Akiva Goldsman is hiding something, but not the fact that he wrote the series with the intention of empathizing with people suffering from mental illness. The chosen narrative structure, in which the cause of Danny’s behavior serves as a sensational dramatic revelation, sounds all the more bizarre.
In the end, more credit for spreading awareness about mental health can go to Tom Holland, who after the premiere announced, that he is taking a year off. Not because of the overwhelming reviews of A Crowded Room, as some tabloid sites wrote, but because, like other actors of his generation, he understands that mental hygiene is more important than work performance.
Serial
A crowded room
Creator: Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Kornél Mundruczó, Brady Corbet and Alan Taylor
The series can be seen on Apple TV+.
2023-06-28 10:12:13
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