**/****
starring Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamadou Athie
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli
by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The high-concept marital satire of Force Majeure meets the prosaic celebrity home tours of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, a dark comedy about a promising young couple undone on the eve of their wedding by a revelation from childhood. The film follows in the tradition of Borgli’s earlier works like Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself, which revel in the destructive force of abrupt, foundation-shaking status shifts between partners in a relationship. It’s good to have a thematic calling card, and The Drama expertly mines the talents of its cast where the prior Dream Scenario merely coasts on the audience’s pre-existing parasocial relationship with Nicolas Cage. But for all of the film’s conceptual wirework–not to mention the rich extratextual discourse surrounding the filmmaker’s recently recovered edgelord essay about dating a teenager when he was 26–The Drama is ultimately too timid to earn its bona fides as a provocative text.
It’s pointless to get into The Drama without getting into the titular drama, so let’s get it out of the way. The film picks up with thirtysomething Boston urbanites Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a British museum curator, and Emma (Zendaya), an editor, as they’re writing their vows, revealed in Rashomon-styled competing accounts of their meet-cute to their respective friend groups. A chance sighting of their wedding DJ smoking an illicit substance on the street gives the self-obsessed couple something else to talk about, and before long they’re spilling the details to their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamadou Athie) at their wedding’s food tasting. Like a drama teacher springing an improv exercise on her unsuspecting students, or like Borgli pitching the film to A24 executives, Rachel treats the DJ incident as a prompt, asking the group to share the worst thing they’ve ever done. Emma rattles them by announcing that when she was a teenager, she stopped just short of executing a mass shooting at her high school–triggering Rachel, whose cousin became disabled from a school shooting, and whose own actual misdeeds towards a disabled person in her story immediately get erased by Emma’s theoretical misdeeds. Charlie becomes a paranoid mess as he wonders whether he’s marrying a psychopath, while the already guarded Emma retreats into herself, not knowing how to sell her fiancé on a new image of her that threatens to undo everything including the meet cute, where she charmingly couldn’t hear him talking to her at a coffee shop because of her deaf ear–which turns out to be impaired from a botched shooting practice with a rifle in her youth.
Borgli’s project hinges on the ostensibly striking contrast between the tidiness of the couple’s relationship to date and the messy postlapsarian reality they are forced to live in after Emma’s confession. But the prefab construction of their relationship beforehand is a testament to the shallowness of Borgli’s script rather than to the couple’s failure to vet one another, and the new grim world they inhabit as a result of having to really look at each other for the first time is no less thinly sketched. In the opening montage, Borgli lovingly photographs the couple–who both make a point of telling their friends how good-looking the other is–at rest in their spacious loft, complete with a spiral staircase, a quaint rocking chair, and big bay windows, only to separate and isolate them there as they spiral. It’s a lovely space in which to find oneself either comfortable or alienated, kitted out with event posters, prints, and artfully-curated book piles courtesy of production designer Zosia McKenzie, but it says nothing about the people who ostensibly inhabit it, a generic pair of professional-class baby millennial archetypes transplanted through time and space from the cinema of Woody Allen, Borgli’s apparent inspiration in art and life. There are, of course, real-world analogues for the facsimiles on display here: clueless white men who cannot fathom their Black partners’ childhoods, bullied teenagers who act out, and even surly teen girls who buck the lone-wolf white male killer archetype. Borgli, however, prefers to dwell among types over individuals, cutting away when Charlie asks Emma why she had this particular psychosis and meting out just enough meagre backstory over the 100 or so minutes to come in the form of flashbacks to Emma’s youth (where she is played by fellow Disney Channel upstart Jordyn Curet, made to look a little dumpy compared to the radiant present-day Emma) to keep us and Charlie guessing. Why close the door on a vague provocation by defining it?
In that much-derided May-December op-ed, Borgli speaks of scrambling to “recalibrate” his moral compass in light of his inappropriate relationship. The phrase is something of a master key into the puzzle boxes of his cinema of recalibration: people altering their self-image to account for a sudden existential rupture. This time, the question is what a person would do if their kind, empathetic partner turned out to be capable of killing them. Alternatively, if one sees it from Emma’s less-defined perspective: how do you convince someone that your decision not to do something bad is truer to your identity than considering doing it in the first place? These discourse bombs about cancel culture and thought crimes are interesting enough, but they need a blunt focalizer like Larry David’s socially maladjusted grump in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to have any real impact. That limitation becomes painfully clear in a set-piece where Charlie stalks Rachel’s disabled cousin (Anna Baryshnikov), awkwardly towering over her on the sidewalk and passive-aggressively putting his hands on her wheelchair to convince her–or maybe himself–that Emma is a good person before letting her go, basically unbothered. It’s a frictionless encounter designed to provoke the spectre of discomfort while reassuring us that Charlie would never do whatever humiliating thing Larry would, but maybe he should if there are to be any stakes in his unravelling.
If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the gameness of the cast. Pattinson perfectly channels his affably silly persona as a closet eccentric who looks like Bruce Wayne but doesn’t know how to talk to people like an adult, particularly Americans like the woman he’s marrying. It benefits his characterization of Charlie’s childish neuroses that, in an interview, Pattinson once demonstrated his inability to use a microwave safely. Though she’s unquestionably a movie star, Zendaya hasn’t been trusted enough by most of the respectable auteurs she’s worked with to play a complex character. Emma is yet another vague object of interest prone to exposition dumps about her childhood; her most character-defining moments go to Curet, who plays Emma as a chameleon, happy to switch from gun violence to gun safety if a cute boy in the David Hogg mold should invite her to a meeting about getting firearms out of schools. Still, Zendaya does her best with the scraps she’s given. At one point, she sheepishly informs her fiancé that a contemporaneous attack that foiled her plans can’t be considered a mass killing because it falls one death short of the required count, sounding like someone who knows her way around the mass shooting wiki. At another, she admits that she got into the whole shooting thing for the “aesthetics,” the reformed Columbine killer stan in her briefly coming out as she sinks back into the mania of being a future school shooter. It’s a pity that, apart from these fleeting signs of life, Borgli invests these characters with no aesthetics whatsoever, no tastes outside of the knick-knacks in their A24-core home, and no opinions outside of whatever might provoke the next drama.
