This review contains spoilers.
After the dud that was “Marty Supreme,” A24 has cooked up another disappointing film featuring a cast of Hollywood heartthrobs and a misleading press run. “The Drama” stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma and Charlie, a handsome couple basking in the bliss of their love in the days leading up to their wedding, when Emma reveals an earth-shattering secret from her past that sends Charlie into a spiral, questioning if he should go through with the marriage.
That’s about the extent to which the film was promoted as: a romantic drama with a shocking plot twist. The film’s press tour indulged in the bridal theme, where Zendaya wore something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, not only playing into the nuptial theme of the film, but simultaneously celebrating her marriage to “Spider-man” co-star Tom Holland. Maybe it was Zendaya’s stylist or maybe the elusive way co-stars Pattinson and Zendaya talked about the movie, but it got people to the theater, bringing in over $14 million on the film’s opening weekend.
The trailers showed the exact scene in which Emma’s secret is revealed, teasing us with characters’ bewildered reactions, ultimately building insatiable intrigue in audiences. This marketing decision is interesting as it feels easy and almost cheap — not only have you set up a very clear expectation for this film that audiences are assuming will be upheld, but you’ve made this plot twist the central focus of the film, therefore the most interesting part of it, making that the only reason people are spending money to go watch the movie. Maybe I’m an intrigue addict or maybe I can’t stand when things are kept from me, but I bought my ticket and sat in the packed AMC theater ready to leave with a sore jaw from gasping so much.
When the plot-twist scene came on, I thought, “this is the scene from the trailer!” and prepared myself for what I was told was the real start of the movie. Emma reveals that when she was in high school, she planned a school shooting but never went through with it. As a direct result of this film’s marketing, I spent the whole first act of the film caught up on the secret that I didn’t realize then what the film was actually trying to do, which was to challenge audiences with an array of ethical and moral questions.
As an American citizen and a Florida native, gun violence and school shootings are not foreign to me, nor is it to the rest of the people living in this country. In the United States, 4,400 kids under the age of 19 are killed by gun violence each year, and an additional 17,000 are injured. Gun violence is something no one is immune to, and the fight for gun reform feels never-ending.
The idea that we have become desensitized to the frequency of students being murdered by using this as a shocking plot point feels more offensive than it does provocative of a difficult kind of conversation. The film instead comes off as a hasty modge-podge of ideas revolutionary only to Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, whose intrigue of rights and wrongs runs deeper than “The Drama.”
In 2012, Borgli wrote an essay ruminating on a romance he had with a teenager when he was 27, saying he “chose to listen to Woody [Allen] over [his] friends.” Like “The Drama,” Borgli’s questions never have answers. He exposes and leaves things as is, conveying little for audiences to talk about. The film becomes about Pattinson’s character and his experience processing this information about his fiancee, rather than their relationship as two. His anxiety around her character as a person poses an ethical question; what from someone’s past are we willing to excuse? Charlie fears and alienates Emma, ultimately cheating on her with his co-worker just days before the wedding.
It feels like an exhibition of messed-up questions rather than answers, meditations or even commentary. The “dark comedy” of the film is a miss, there’s nothing funny about gun violence in a nation where we still haven’t gotten past “thoughts and prayers.” Especially considering the film’s lack of resolute stance on the issue, because Charlie almost cheating on her before the wedding is definitely not a solution. In the current social-political climate, a film like this feels out of touch and almost insulting. At least we got to see Zendaya.
