There actually was a real story that inspired the 2018 Broadway musical The Prom by Chad Beguelin, Bob Martin, and Matthew Sklar. A girl in Mississippi wanted to bring her girlfriend to the senior prom and was banned by the local school board. She challenged this, resulting in the prom itself being canceled -all the while various celebrities came out in support of her. Ultimately she won a court case, though the prom still didn’t go forward. So the musical became something of a wish fulfillment on this idea -to give a girl in a similar situation the prom she deserved, orchestrated by stars from ostensibly the most queer-friendly entertainment industry: Broadway. It’s a cute premise, if a little parochial (the whole idea of proms being a critical aspect of high school culture that every teen “deserves” is a uniquely American phenomenon that doesn’t really resonate with me at all). I could see it making for a decent Broadway show, even as self-congratulatory as it is. And then Ryan Murphy had to come along and ruin it.
Granted, I don’t know how much of this 2020 film adaptation is native to the show or a touch of Murphys’ -that is aside from the uniquely cinematic aspects of the production. But most of the worst choices here have to have been his, and they line up with the tendencies of some of his more recent television projects, many of which are likewise about the lives and priorities of entertainers, his disastrous Hollywood show being the most recent example. Here too, the focal point, both in-text and out, seems to be the elevation of queer voices and demonstrations of equality –and here too, it’s just as insubstantial and hacky.
A lot of where this movie flounders I think comes down to timing. Much like Happiest Season, it’s another one-note premise that seems to be all Hollywood is comfortable with when it comes to queer stories, and it is so unbelievably easy to be on the protagonists side here, even for social conservatives; what with Kerry Washingtons’ school PTA chair and the homophobic classmates such cartoons that the story barely feels like it has the basis in reality that it does. About fifteen years ago that wouldn’t matter, because so few movies were shining a spotlight on LGBTQ issues, and the general goodwill and themes of acceptance and tolerance of the movie would carry more weight. But now there are dozens of movies and shows covering the same thematic ground as The Prom, only much better, and so the film itself feels rather antiquated. In the days before gay marriage was commonly accepted law for instance, this movie would have meant more. Now it just comes off as bare minimum gay representation.
Though of course even there it’s very lacking, because while the movie features Andrew Rannells, and both the teen actresses are queer, the most prominent, explicit gay character is played by a straight man. And not just any straight man, but James Corden in perhaps the most offensive gay stereotype of a performance that I’ve seen in maybe a decade. He pulls out all the stops: a camp dialect in a high register, that fragile poise with bent down hands, highly specific dietary requirements, and a grandiose attention-craving attitude to everything he does. All he’s missing is a lisp and he would be the perfect portrait of the archetypal 90s gay caricature. It’s often embarrassing to watch, but being a lead character, he dominates most of the movie. What’s sad is there’s clearly a sincerity to the part, and a backstory and character arc dealing with an estranged family and lingering trauma from his own prom, but it never rings even remotely true under Cordens’ painful and kind of gross gay appropriation.
His co-lead is Meryl Streep as a veteran Broadway diva, performing adequately a part seemingly tailor-made for (if not directly inspired by) Patti LuPone –incidentally a regular collaborator of Murphys’. That said, I never thought I’d say it but Meryl Streep is one of the better parts of this musical, without being quite good enough to save it. Unfairly consigned to the background are Rannells and astonishingly Nicole Kidman, while Keegan-Michael Key is given perhaps too much screen-time as the principal smitten with Streep. Unsurprisingly the best performers of the movie are the two young girls: Jo Ellen Pellman as Emma, the student at the heart of it all, and Ariana DeBose as her still-closeted girlfriend Alyssa. They get the best songs, the interesting character drama, they have nice chemistry, but they’re constantly overshadowed by the bigger stars (and on some of the posters, are actually cut off in favour of the bigoted Washington). It’s an irony that nobody involved in the production seemed to have spotted –as much as the prom is emphasized as being about Emma, the Broadway scribes make sure that it’s really about their own.
All the while the movie is garish to the point of obnoxiousness in song and dance sequences that I have to imagine play better on stage. The songs themselves generally aren’t very good anyway, but they’re shot in a way that speaks to little experience with musical performance on film –and Murphy is the guy who created Glee! The cinematography is awkward, and for performances deliberately meant to evoke the spontaneity of theatre, they’re awfully static, and sometimes interspersed with cutaways that disrupt the flow of the sequence. And the lighting in these, often favouring muted colours, is just gaudy and kind of ugly –the whole film at times seems drenched in a pale sheen that makes it boring to look at.
By the time the movie reaches its’ customary easy ending, it has well overstayed its’ welcome. There are severe pacing issues (likely originating in how the show goes about facilitating its act break), at least three songs too many, and the whole story thread about the actors learning to care about Emmas’ circumstance from more than a superficial PR standpoint, which might have had some bite from a stronger satirist than Murphy, is tiresome and not an ounce believable. I didn’t care much about the ritualistic veneration of proms going in, and I cared even less coming out. Perhaps I hoped that The Prom would be another Greatest Showman or Into the Woods –utterly terrible in narrative or structure, but with at least some great songs to carry it through. Sadly though, it isn’t that in either the highs or the lows. It’s a middling musical film that already feels like a relic.
And as far as this genre goes, Corden especially just really needs to stop.
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