Green Room

What’s your desert island band?  You know, the one band whose music you could take with you to a deserted island.

Think for a moment.

Got it?

Now I’m going to ask you the same question, except this time I’m pointing a gun to your head.  If you lie, I’ll know it. And I’ll pull the trigger.

So…did you get the same answer?

Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t.  Either way a truth about you came out.

This exact question comes up a few times in the excellent new film Green Room, and while it’s not integral to the plot, I think it sums up the film’s theme of finding out what you’re made of when faced with the worst.  And no, the worst doesn’t just mean being in danger, but a certain and brutal end.  How will you face that end once the fear is so overwhelming that all you can control is to be unafraid?

That wasn’t a spoiler by the way, just certain questions that Green Room subtly presents.  It tells the story of a down on their luck punk band, “The Ain’t Rights,” who are finishing up a long and unsuccessful tour; the film spends the opening twenty minutes getting to know the four band members as played by Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joel Cole, and Callum Turner.  We don’t so much get their personalities, but we do get to see them function as a struggling group that could spend all night talking about music, unless they’re playing it.   I was struck by how after those first twenty minutes, the characters felt like a real band, as they go from antagonizing one another, to arguing, to making each-other laugh.  I almost forgot that the movie wasn’t going to be about their journey to relevance.

Because things go horribly wrong.

Before they decide to end the tour, they get an unsuspected booking at an isolated run-down club in the backwoods of Oregon.  They’re warned ahead of time that it’s a rather white power crowd, and therefore should play their “hard stuff” to avoid as many bottles thrown there way as possible.  There’s something ominous in the way director Jeremy Saulnier shoots their arrival to the gig, almost like they’re walking into a pitfall.  It’s not the case right away though, as they get the ground rules of the place; play their set, and get paid for it.  But when they go to leave, one of the band members goes back into the green room to retrieve a forgotten cell phone.  What he finds is a young woman murdered and the assailant standing over her.  Panic ensues, and the band find themselves trapped in the green room with the victim’s friend (Imogen Poots), while the overseers of the club try to calm the situation.  Once it becomes clear that the only way all of them will leave this predicament is in the not-breathing capacity, a chess match begins between the owner of the club (Patrick Stewart) and the cornered band.  Except that this chess match would be as if one side holds two queens while the other must make due with middling pawns.

I won’t go into how events unfold, except to say that they are shocking, gruesome, and unrelenting for the entirety of the film.  That’s not an easy achievement, as a film like this usually requires stupidity on behalf of both sides to move the pieces off the game board, but Saulnier doesn’t make those mistakes.  The trapped characters behavior goes from an understandable panic to a numbed bravery; they exhaust options quickly because there isn’t many to exhaust. This very early realization helps the film push toward a conclusion that becomes inevitable much earlier than usual in these kind of stories.

The performances from the actors playing the band members show a constant intelligence through their confusion.  Yelchin has never been better, and it was nice to see Shawkat flex some dramatic muscle after years in Arrested Development. The best performance goes to Poots, first seeming like she’s going to stay in the background, only to emerge as a strong player.  The actors playing the skinheads on the other side of the door have a few stand-out performances of their own. I especially liked Macon Blair as the club manager who gradually feels the weight of the situation as it unfolds.  Patrick Stewart, cast against type, is every bit the thespian he always is, but here he makes for a commanding and nasty presence that kills with stern calm.

Surprisingly, the film manages to make a comment on animal cruelty, as attack dogs are used to terrorize the protagonists.  That’s not the observation though; It comes near the film’s conclusion, and it moved me when I least expected it (which is why I note it here).  Animals can teach us things about our nature that are damning in their simplicity.

Simplicity, such as having a gun pointed at your head and finding out you prefer Bobby Darin to Black Sabbath.

Grade: A