With the Oscars just around the corner, I recently saw a
much-nominated new film, Room, and an
real oldie, Gaslight. Darned if they
didn’t make a great pairing, with several elements in common. So I’m going to
compare and contrast, as my teachers used to say.
Gaslight started
as a hit 1938 play by British dramatist Patrick Hamilton. The premise of this
period thriller is that a husband who has gotten away with murder tries to
convince his young wife of her own insanity so that he can keep on searching
for the missing jewels that belonged to his victim. When the play transferred
to Broadway, under the title Angel Street,
the murderous spouse was played by none other than Vincent Price. A 1940
British film adaptation much admired by critics was suppressed when Hollywood decided
to launch its own version.
In 1944 Gaslight became a major M-G-M release,
directed by the great George Cukor. It was nominated for seven Oscars,
including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Black-and-White
Cinematography. Charles Boyer was nominated for playing the evil Gregory Anton,
as was Angela Lansbury (in her film debut) for her role as a cheeky chambermaid
with her own reasons for working against the mistress of the house. That
fragile young mistress, Paula, was played by Ingrid Bergman, who won her first
Oscar for her pains. Cedric Gibbons’ elegant Victorian art direction was also
honored by Oscar voters.
To sum up, Gaslight is
the story of a clever but sinister man who marries in order to take advantage
of his new wife’s ownership of the house where he believes his victim’s jewels
are hidden. While making a great show of being solicitous of Paula’s health, he
cuts her off from human companionship and undermines her faith in her own
sanity. It’s an ugly story, despite its attractive Victorian surroundings, but Room (adapted by Emma Donoghue from her
own prize-winning 2010 novel) is far uglier still. Maybe that fact says
something about our troubled age.
In Room there’s no
marriage, and no pretense. The character played by Brie Larson, known as Ma, is
even more trapped than Paula, but it is not psychological wiles that keep her
confined. She is a victim of abduction and rape; for seven years she’s been
locked by her captor inside a garden shed fitted out with minimal cooking and
toilet facilities. She must look to the man she has labeled “Old Nick” for
foodstuffs and other bare necessities; in return she must submit to him
sexually, night after night. He even toys with her, when she shows any sign of
resistance, by cutting off electricity, leaving her in a physically precarious
state. Her situation may have made her distraught, but she’s always fully aware
of the horrors afflicted upon her.
Of course, what makes all the difference for Ma is the
presence of her five-year-old son, Jack, Though born of rape, he is completely
and totally hers, and she devotes all
the energy she can muster to nurturing, teaching, and protecting him. Both book
and film are essentially told from Jack’s perspective, that of a bright child
who has never realized there’s a wide world outside of the place he calls Room.
The filmmakers’ challenge, brilliantly achieved, is to create an environment as
seen through Jack’s eyes, then allow us to look beyond what Jack can grasp to
give us a glimpses of his mother’s very adult challenges. In Gaslight, Paula only comes into her own
when a visitor from Scotland Yard fortuitously checks out her situation. Ma,
though, must solve her problems on her own.