Single White Classmate - ‘The Roommate’ Review

I actually have a tremendous amount of patience for bad movies. Even movies that are deliberately bad can be entertaining to me, but movies that either don’t know they’re bad or, even worse, pretend that they’re good, drive me nuts. And that’s what The Roommate is.

First of all, it’s a flagrant rip-off of the vastly superior Single White Female. I don’t even need to mention that. But the worst part is that it’s an unoriginal story centered on two wholly generic Hollywood nobodies without a shred of personality between them, to say nothing of the fact that they’re nearly indistinguishable from each other.

So here’s the story. Sara (Minka Kelly) is a college student from Iowa enrolled at the cleverly named Los Angeles University. We meet her as she moves into her dorm and proceeds through a series of clunky introductions to her hugely uninteresting classmates. Getting used to life away from parents, she checks out the nightlife and finds herself getting involved with a guy who feeds her some pickup lines that no self-respecting man in real life would ever utter out loud, but I guess it works in this movie. This may be a sign that you have to be drunk to enjoy it.

Heading home, she meets Rebecca (Leighton Meester), the new roommate. We learn little about her other than that she lives 20 minutes away and loves art as much as Sara and is interested in stealing her identity. She seems nice enough at first but gradually gets creepier and creepier, dyeing her hair to match Rebecca’s and copying her mannerisms and whatnot until Sara eventually catches on and gets a little freaked out and so decides maybe she should center a little more of her time on her other friends and not quite so much on Rebecca, at which point Rebecca understandably embarks on the warpath.

And what follows is a talentless update on the overused so-and-so from hell subgenre. Forget about the total lack of any kind of realism captured in any element of the story. Sara is meant to be a normal college student who is terrorized by some nutty chick who becomes wildly obsessed with her, but it’s so paper-thin and superficial that the whole thing will go in one ear and right out the other. This may be the single most forgettable movie this year so far. 2011 hasn’t been around that long, I know, but The Roommate may hold that title for quite a while. I shudder to think what might displace it.

I don’t generally get personally offended by movies, and I’m not by this one, despite it’s prodigious idiocy, but it does strike me as almost criminally idiotic in the way that Rebecca’s backstory is treated. It’s one thing to have an evil character without much of a background or a reason for their evil behavior. This was pulled off in spectacular fashion in The Dark Knight, for example.

But Rebecca’s a psychotic roommate who sets out to destroy Sara’s life and then take over her identity and she doesn’t have a shred of background to explain what’s going on. In this case it’s more necessary than with The Joker, since he’s  a comic book villain. But why is Rebecca so nuts? Was she molested as a kid? Did her parents beat her? It can’t be because her parents don’t get along, which we do learn in the movie. My parents have been divorced for 30 years and you don’t see me trying to steal anyone’s identity or torturing animals.

But then they throw in the biggest cop-out of all, the plunk in some random thing about mental illness, perpetuating Hollywood’s moronic myth that mental illness and dangerous psychotic behavior are essentially the same thing. Yawn. Had the movie been told from Rebecca’s point of view instead of Sara’s, it would have approached an already wildly familiar storyline with at least a fresh perspective, but director Christian Christiansen opted instead to tell the same story from the same perspective and chalk it all up to mental illness and let the limp climax play itself out and then collect his paycheck and move on.

I can relate to that though, I’m ready to move on, too. Kind of wish I had held on to my money this time, though.

The Bean Meter