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The Drama is Out of its Depth

The Drama is designed to be controversial, to push buttons it knows a lot of people would rather not be pushed. And sometimes that is a valuable facet of movies. To force us to confront the uncomfortable and consider more deeply our thoughts and beliefs as we would not otherwise be prodded to do. In some respects, director Kristoffer Borgli succeeds quite a bit at this -the premise he gives his audience is certainly one they will be mulling over. But there is a level of responsibility that must come with being intentionally this provocative, for the point to strike as something genuinely meaningful beyond its mere ethical or thematic transgression. And Borgli has a very tough time showcasing that, or demonstrating any real care towards the severity of the subject matter and his particular choices in presenting it.
In case you have forgotten, I am talking about the A24 romance movie featuring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson that has gotten some traction via its unique marketing tactics of publishing a fictitious engagement announcement in the Boston Globe (momentarily stunning celebrity-watchers invested in Zendaya’s relationship with Tom Holland), and further fake articles making the rounds related to these characters and the date of their impending nuptials (the release date of the movie of course). Perhaps it did its job well of raising awareness for the movie while completely misleading the public as to what it is actually about. The degree of this is pretty intense. Those expecting a cutesy wedding picture are in for a shock.
The Drama is a movie about the question of darkness lingering in the human soul -more directly it is about the spectre of gun violence in America. That is not what it leads as -we are introduced to the winsome but fairly mundane romance of Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) who have a very typical awkward meet-cute at a coffee shop in Boston that sparks a relationship lasting a few years before they get engaged. The wedding planning goes very nicely until one evening at a fancy wine night with their respective best man and maid of honour Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), they compare the worst things they have ever done, which culminates in Emma admitting she once nearly carried out a school shooting when she was fifteen and that her deafness in one ear, which she claimed has been a condition since birth, was caused by an accident in practice with a gun. The revelation deeply disturbs the whole party and Charlie in particular, who now attempts to reconcile this shocking past with who Emma is now.
It isn’t just that the turn here is so abrupt and unexpected and the subject suddenly under discussion is a very sensitive one, but that we see from Charlie’s neurotic point-of-view flashbacks or hallucinated intrusions into his own life imagery around this near horrific crime. A teenage Emma polishing an AK-47 in her bedroom, firing it, glancing menacingly at bullies in school; or that version of her out on a date with him, or an image of carnage in the wake of a wedding reception. It really brings the gravity of Emma’s confession to the forefront of the movie, and particularly its unsettling impact on Charlie. Charlie is in some ways not unlike Nicolas Cage’s protagonist in Borgli’s last film Dream Scenario, just as hyper-focused and idiosyncratic and psychologically put-upon, as he is at the centre of a vehement social commentary.
And yet, for its understandably disturbing effects on Charlie, the movie takes relatively little interest in Emma and her psychology. Primarily, she is there to embody a trauma with this history and be victimized for it, in subtle perhaps unintentional ways by Charlie, though much more explicitly by Rachel -who immediately lambastes and turns on her. Borgli generates a lot of sympathy for Emma, but it doesn’t mean a lot when her perspective -critical under this kind of premise- is so often obscured by Charlie’s.
There is a political implication in this that can't be avoided. On one level the movie does take note of the double standard being applied to Emma. Charlie makes a point of how Emma can hardly be assumed to be alone in her former sentiments; that it is quite likely many American teenagers have been near perpetrators of mass shootings, given the ease of U.S. gun access, failures in mental health systems and awareness, and just the general cultural ubiquity of these tragedies. Likewise it is worth acknowledging that her fiercest critic, Rachel, is the one out of their friend group who actually did commit a crime -having once locked an autistic kid in the closet of a camper van, prompting a search party- to which she was never held accountable. Of course, the level of grace she is given for this would not be extended to Emma, who also is not nearly as confident she can avoid consequences for a lesser offence. That Emma's race plays a part in all this, both in how Rachel and Charlie react (each of whom curiously are in interracial relationships) and to some degree how the audience does too -despite black women making up an infinitesimal fraction of mass shooting perpetrators- might be shrewd messaging if the lack of perspective and development for Emma didn't suggest Borgli himself is naive to it.
Yet he can't afford to be given how apparently dedicated he is to the conversation on gun violence in America. And Borgli's perspective might be crystallized in the comment Charlie makes about American gun culture being ultimately responsible. Borgli is Norwegian and Charlie is British -outsiders supposedly allowed to comment objectively (and with a little bit of condescension) about the plague of gun violence that is a problem for the U.S. and no other country. As a Canadian, I get the impulse to be judgmental on that, but Borgli doesn't ultimately have anything to say on the subject of school shootings beyond the taboo of alluding to them with a level of dark humour that doesn't land how it is meant to. If he does intend to put the blame on American gun culture as it appears, he doesn't do anything with his script to expound on that. No thoughtful exploration is had, it is just there to ominously linger and sow anxiety -to some bewildering lengths in Charlie.
Charlie's feelings over the whole situation encompasses a range from understandable to incomprehensible. And it's not enough that he has doubts over the wedding, but he romantically and sexually considers other women. It doesn't help that his initial approach to Emma was manipulative and creepy, barely masked by his befuddled personality. His neuroses again resemble Cage in Dream Scenario, but it is harder for Borgli to generate a similar sympathy given he is in no way victimized through the movie. He is sporadically funny though, and Pattinson does a good job with the part. He and Zendaya have a decent chemistry in spite of a certain inherent shallowness to their relationship that Borgli doesn't quite seem to be aware of; for her part, she gives a worthy effort for how much the script fails her. And Haim, as the underlying villain of the piece, is impressive in how mean she plays her part. With this cast, something strong really might have come out of this movie.
The climax is tense and the ending a bit puzzling -aiming for something very sweet and earnest that in another context would absolutely work -but here feels like a movie trying to course-correct back to the story it was before the central revelation. However the genii was let out of the bottle and there is no way to meaningfully diffuse that. The Drama doesn't fail because it injects a narrative on mass shootings into a romantic comedy-drama, it fails because it has nothing to say when it does. Borgli gestures at fascinating commentary on several intertwining issues, but goes no further -all while being somewhat naive to what it is he is actually expressing. It is an unforgettable movie -it deserves that. But it does not live up to the hype its shock is designed to generate.

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