Oscars 2021 | "The Letter Room" and Oscar Isaac's Wrong Cop

7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars

When we’re feeling adrift, we tend to latch ourselves on to the narratives that strike us as being more interesting than our own. This is the premise explored in Elvira Lind’s now Oscar nominated short film, The Letter Room, in which a corrections officer’s new assignment as Director of Prisoner Communicationleads him to develop an unexpectedly personal investment in the correspondences between a death row inmate and his girlfriend on the outside.

Perennially adored Oscar Isaac stars as the officer in question, Richard - a moustachioed, greying, and beer belly-sporting schlub who practically sleep walks through the 9-to-5 of his job at an American penitentiary (which, quite tellingly, operates more like an office space than anything else). He has a friendly rapport with a few of the inmates, but is otherwise a lonely soul during his day-to-day, and spends his evenings alone watching telenovelas with his dog. But a far more gripping drama unfolds within the letters exchanged between his prisoners and their loved ones – one string of letters, in particular, becoming both a source of intrigue with its aching and intimate verbiage, and a cause for concern of the safety of the writer.

Though directed with calculated assurance, The Letter Room has a little difficulty deciding what it wants its tone to be. Its tagline promises “a dark prison comedy,” but its subject matter never pushes in to the grimness of the prison setting, and its comedy is front-loaded in the film’s establishing scenes. The Letter Room is, in its essence, a light, dramatic character study, but it leans heavily on Isaac’s charm and star-power to make it a study of any nuance. That said, Isaac’s performance should be commended – his weary eyes and boyish earnestness earn him great sympathy in his misguided attempt at finding a hero narrative that does not need to exist.

Lind worked previously to produce a number of award-winning documentaries, and has explained how her fictional debut is meant to reveal how a process like mail screening at American prisons “further robs people who live [there] of their dignity and privacy.” While her film does shine a light on this seldom-considered procedure, what it is trying to illustrate in terms of a dehumanizing effect is unclear. The focus of The Letter Room is kept on the foibles of Isaac’s correctional officer, and the introduction of Alia Shawkat’s character later on fails to inject the emotional heft that was perhaps being aimed for.  

The Letter Room had its world premier at Tribeca Film Festival in 2020, and has since toured around to Telluride, Palm Springs International, and HollyShorts; Lind and Isaac’s new production company, Mad Gene, assures the film continued attention. On April 25th, The Letter Room will compete against four other shorts in the Best Live Action Short Film category of the 93rd Academy Awards.