The Roommate is a largely missed opportunity, right down to the design of the actual “room” these “mates” share. As escapist Hollywood entertainment does, everything at the fictional University of Los Angeles is better looking than your college experience. Often freshman dorms have more in common with prison cells and housing projects: brutalist architecture built on the cheap, reflecting a period before colleges became more competitive by building more glamorous accommodations. Imagine a cinder block cave, isolated as two roommates slowly adapt to each others personalities, world-views and meld into something that will haunt your being. This could be great psychological drama. In fact, I’m going to register this treatment with the Writers Guild after I finish this review.
Instead, Danish director Christian E. Christiansen, in his English-language debut, tries too hard to keep a straight face, crafting a thriller that we’ve seen before, although this may be the first PG-13-rated lesbian-themed psychological thriller for the tween market. I will give him props for allowing that to play out, instead of burying it in the subtext. Scholars have worked with horror as a form of gender study, but let us not go there – this is a film review. An academic paper could be written to that end, but it’s beneath both a PhD Candidate at the University of Iowa’s Film and Comparative Literature Department and this fine publication.
Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly play two sexy co-eds (the term co-ed itself the creepiest term you can call a female student) who share a plush, well-appointed room (I didn’t know that W Hotels is now running the dorm situation). Kelly (previously Autumn in (500) Days of Summer) is Sara Matthews, a young woman who has moved without the assistance of her parents from Des Moines, IA. The plan was to move with to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, who has abandoned her when a free spot opened at Brown. Enter her assigned roommate: a mentally unstable young lesbian, Rebecca (Meester of Country Strong and Cobra Starship’s “Good Girls Gone Bad”).
A bad influence is party girl Tracy, played by Aly Michalka (from Easy A and the highly-underrated tween indie rock drama Bandslam). Tracey takes Sara to a frat party where she’s given the creepy eye by the brain dead indie rocker/frat brother Cam Gigandet, who is a proud date rapist (he brags the punch is spiked so after two glasses a girl must come upstairs). He must be a super senior (when he’s not wearing his eye-liner and bondage inspired outfits as he was in Burlesque, he looks like he’s pushing 30).
And herein lies the problem: how do you relate, or even enter a film in which you hate every single character? One way is to put up a barrier between us and the characters through irony or parody: there is not a sympathetic character here. Everyone is rich, white and entitled. The problem I assume is Christiansen, divorced in Denmark from the imagery of Gossip Girl, The Jersey Shore and even Dawson’s Creek, with no frame of reference to pull off anything interesting beyond basic product.
Another director fostered by Screen Gems, the boutique studio responsible for this schlock (and they frequently repeat this PG-13 thriller formula), is Will Gluck, who I assume is given a certain amount of latitude to do what he will. The expectations and budgets are low enough where he can take risks. This is what the film needs – a biting sense of humor and even fun. When a boring film devoid of edge takes itself too seriously this is a curse. The major question is how did the lesbian subtext find its way into the text. It’s assumed Rebecca is very much “out” of the closet, at least to herself and her parents. In fact, seducing women is the only seduction she enjoys, and she has a certain “type” she goes for: pretty dark haired girls. Luckily, ULA’s Residential Life department paired her with Sara.
The film has several shortcomings, from a frantic, disorienting editing style to a lack of originality and/or humor. It provides a measure of escapism and aspiration for a tween market but anyone who has been to college, suffered in a tiny bed in a brick dorm that looked like something out of an urban housing project and complained to their RA that their roommate was off their meds cannot relate to this inept train wreck.
