[Fantasia 2020 Review] The Oak Room Needs a Tad More Goosin'

What’s the worth of a story? Is it, in the misunderstood words of the characters in The Oak Room, worth a thousand words? Or is it, as another character would say, useless? Can you buy things with it, like you could, say, a watch? Or a bar? 

It’s a dark, wintery night in a small Canadian bar as Paul (Peter Outerbridge) wearily cleans up before closing. But as he’s finishing his cleaning, a man hustles down the stairs to the door and bursts in, ignoring Paul’s taciturn, “we’re closed.” The mystery man dressed in dark clothes and a ski mask reveals himself to be Steve (RJ Mitte), a sort of prodigal son who has returned to town. Paul, it’s fair to say, is not happy to see him. 

You see, Steve’s father Gordon (Nicholas Campbell) has recently passed and because he had no one in town to take care of him, Paul spent his meager earnings to pay for Gordon’s funeral and cremation. He didn’t even have enough to buy a ceremonial urn and so Gordon’s ashes are kept in his old tackle box. And now? Now Steve has the guts to show up to reclaim some of Gordon’s belongings? Paul calls a mysterious person who Steve owes a lot of money to with the threat that if he doesn’t get his money, “he’s going to take one of his smokes and put it out in your fucking eyeball.” 

So Steve wryly says that he has something better than money. “I’ve got a story.” 

And so as they pass time for the mysterious man to show up, Steve slaps down a coaster for The Oak Room and tells Paul he’s never going to believe what happened at The Oak Room. It happened last week on a night much like tonight. Where a surly bartender named Michael (Ari Millen) is closing up his shop much like Paul was tonight. And...wait a minute, “this is all sounding a bit familiar. Let me guess a jerkoff comes in and everything goes to shit?” Paul interrupts. 

“Exactly.”

This time, the uninvited guest is Richard (Martin Roach) and he bursts in with an injured hand and a suspicious story of trudging miles through the frozen tundra. But as Michael the bartender and this guest Richard chat, things don’t completely add up. For either of them. And somehow, these stories within stories (sometimes within stories) crisscross and you’ll never guess how they add up.

I mean, you might. But you probably won’t care if you’re as invested in the conversations as I found myself. The Oak Room is based on a play written by Peter Genoway, the screenwriter of this movie and it leans hard in the conversational nature of theatre. Before I even knew this fact, I thought to myself how well it’d play as a...well...as a play. Most of the action and drama is staged as conversations between two men who tell stories that play out like vignettes. There’s virtually no action, though there is blood as hinted at in the poster. Instead, it’s about the wait and worth of a story and the way storytelling, and, most importantly, who’s telling it, that matters. 

What helps elevate this narrative from its humble beginnings as a play is the cinematography by Jeff Maher. His ability to stage a conversation gives fluidity and pacing to what’s ostensibly a group of conversations. From the beginning, the way it focuses on particular items; say, a watch or a phone...or, maybe, a bat...tells us what we need to know. It foreshadows events in such an intriguing and subtle way that impatient viewers might miss out on what’s actually at stake. And I’d be lying if, at the end, I didn’t think, “huh?”

It thrives on the ambiguity of storytelling in ways we’ve seen recently like the more artsy and experimental She Dies Tomorrow. Facts and story beats are dolled out in subtle ways. And the smallest details can end up coloring how you view the ending. What I found most striking was the way it plays with the idea of an unreliable narrator...or in this case, narrators. This is when The Oak Room is at its best, as we get lost in the dueling narratives and the act of storytelling becomes a bargaining chip, maybe, but also something that’s as dangerous as the shotgun hidden behind the bar. Stories about storytelling really scratch an itch and The Oak Room’s way of exploring the importance of stories is admirable and entertaining; it helped me overlook some of the flaws until the ending.

At one point, when Paul gets bored with the way Steve is telling the story of what happened at The Oak Room, Paul yells that Steve needs to “goose the truth” before launching into his own story about Steve’s dad. Goosin’ the truth, or embellishing story details to be more interesting to the audience, absolutely comes into play in the back half. With a playful glint, director Cody Calahan intersperses enough goosin’ in the stories to make you wonder whether Steve is a good guy--the actual prodigal son come home to fix up his mess--or whether there’s something more sinister at play. And a story about Gordon’s experience hitchhiking adds a layer of fatalism that can’t be shaken. 

I’m just not completely satisfied with how it all comes together...or even if it does come together. There’s enough subtlety to the story that those who want clear-cut answers or some big euphoric moment of epiphany might be disappointed. Because while the story feels like it should end on a bang, it ends on a more ominous whisper. The sound of a bar door opening. What’s on the other side is up to the viewer, though there are hints hidden throughout. And in an interesting wrinkle to the ambiguous story, depending on what the viewer focuses on will probably color the ending. And for a movie that talks about the need to “goose” a story, I found myself rewinding a portion that felt played like a revelation that didn’t really reveal as much as I think the narrative thinks it does. I was left wishing that the finale would bring everything together or leave us with a kind of gasped realization.

Maybe the story could have used a little goosin’ itself.