Film Review: The Letter Room
The Letter Room (2020), Courtesy of Topic
The Letter Room: not exactly the place anyone wants to be transferred to at work. It’s menial, a busy-work assignment that no one ever wants to pick up. The work is boring at best, grating at worst...unless you find something to make it worth your while.
That is the situation presented in Elvira Lind’s The Letter Room, nominated this month for Best Live Action Short Film at the Academy Awards. Written and directed by Lind, and starring her husband Oscar Isaac, it presents the story of a lonely prison corrections officer whose life is irreparably complicated when he is assigned to the mail room, and becomes invested in the correspondence received by a death row inmate.
The Letter Room (2020), Courtesy of Topic
Shot while Lind was seven months pregnant, The Letter Room marks the first film production for Mad Gene Media, Lind and Isaac’s fledgling production company. Also starring Alia Shawkat (Search Party), the film serves as Lind’s first foray into scripted filmmaking, a sharp but poignant turn from her work in documentary film. Our country’s need for prison reform is all but plastered across the walls of the script, from the grey monotony of prison life to the attitudes of Isaac’s fellow corrections officers. It bills itself as a dark comedy, but there is a blandness to it — all greys and browns, as if no one had bothered with any kind of color grading. The silence accompanying it is profound; there is nothing cinematic or exciting about the life that Richard leads, as is the reality for actual prisoners and corrections officers. Life is simply a string of days, one after the other, so much that something as simple as the contents of a letter can become wildly interesting.
The Letter Room (2020), Courtesy of Topic
Isaac appears with none of the grandeur of Star Wars or Dune, abandoning his cult “Internet boyfriend” status in favor of a fat suit and a stumbling cadence. His “Richard”—given no formal last name—drives a tiny Honda hatchback, and his home is cluttered and messy. He speaks softly, and without the drive of the other correctional officers. He is awkward, almost painfully so; less a hero, and more a man whose eyes we just happen to be gazing through.
It fits Isaac better, perhaps—this kind of middling, friendly man. He plays as though he is easy to talk to, though stiff. A friendly neighbor, the stranger you’d trust to watch your bag at Starbucks. When he is moved to the titular letter room, there is a discomfort in watching Richard work. Lind presents us with an odd kind of voyeurism, both into his life and in the ways he peers into the lives of others. Is it wrong to do as he does, because he was told not to read letters in full? Is he in the right, because he is in a position of power, however small? Is there a black-and-white, moral answer to reading private letters?
Or is it simply human nature to be invested—to care about those around us and those we have the power to help?
The Letter Room (2020), Courtesy of Topic
The Letter Room offers this and many other questions, bringing to light as many as Lind can fit into thirty short minutes. She shines a flashlight, opens a window into what it means to have family incarcerated, the experience on both sides of a prison wall. Who is to care for them—both prisoners and their loved ones? Who is to say what we deserve, what is appropriate? We are all still people, Lind posits—and people are far more complex than simply innocent or guilty.
As Shawkat’s Rosita offers in explanation, “we all need someone to love us.”
The Letter Room is now streaming on Topic.
