SPOILERS FOLLOW
What is the most miserably funny wedding ever put to screen? For my money, it’s got to go to Peep Show’s truly brutal series 4 finale, 25 minutes of torture wrapped up in a bow of cringe-until-you-die comedy. For his follow-up to his Nicholas-Cage-gets-supernaturally-cancelled comedy Dream Scenario, The Drama, Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli has set himself the challenge of basically taking that classic episode and stretching it out to full movie length, with mostly very effective results. Across a disastrous last week before a wedding, Borgli takes his characters and puts them through the social and emotional wringer until the stink of desperation has engulfed the whole cinema.
At least his lead couple bring the glam in the form of the none-more-hot and none-more-chic duo of Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Pattinson, in a rare case of keeping his natural accent, plays Charlie, a British museum curator in Cambridge, Massachusetts who clumsily orchestrates a meet-cute with the younger Emma (Zendaya) that starts out kinda pathetic but is charming enough in its bumbling that Emma is won over. We get a quick montage of this relationship growing into a picture perfect Hollywood couple – Borgli even gives them the classic romcom staple of a lovely giant city apartment that there’s no way they could afford.
It all unravels during a drunken game with Charlie’s best man Mike (Mamadou Athie) and Mike’s wife Rachel (Alana Haim), who is also Emma’s maid of honour (Borgli doesn’t make too much of this, but it’s interesting to see a couple where the groom-to-be is much richer in friends than the bride). As each person, dizzy off of rehearsal dinner wine, rattles off the worst thing they’ve ever done, Emma goes last and reveals that, as a depressed and lonely 15-year-old, she planned a school shooting, even bringing her dad’s rifle to school before backing out after another local shooting earlier in the day stole her thunder.
Mike is dumbstruck, Rachel furious, and Charlie, for whom (as a Brit) the concept is even more alien, spirals – is his wife-to-be a psychopath? What violence has she been capable of all along? Borgli puts all his characters into a perpetual panic mode, and every decision made from then all the way to the wedding speeches themselves just gets worse and worse. It’s pretty funny and deeply cringy, Borgli revelling in the bone-chilling awkwardness in both his script and impassive visuals, the camera always sitting in judgement, either too close or too far away, never letting the people within a frame sit comfortably.
Zendaya is solid as the woman at the centre of the whirlwind, both in the wrong and being wronged in a moral system that Borgli puts under a microscope. As is the modern American way, intent factors way more into people’s reactions than outcomes; Rachel’s ‘worst thing ever’ is actually far more horrible in practice than Emma *nearly* doing something, but she didn’t ‘mean badly’, so she is largely excused. Pattinson, meanwhile, is at his best here whenever Charlie is at his most pathetic and cowardly.
He gets a lot of desperate moments where he’s laughing at nothing or letting sentences trail on for far too long just to try and fill the air, not brave enough to call Emma’s potential mass murder a bridge too far for him but also not brave enough to stand up for her and her miserable past self. It’s a fine balancing act to keep these characters interesting without just becoming idiot caricatures, and Borgli allows himself some unusual warmth to not have Emma and Charlie be simply awful – at their best as a couple there’s real love and fun and commitment.
Unlike Dream Scenario, there are only so many avenues The Drama can possibly go down as the wedding looms, so Borgli can’t really truly surprise us that often after Emma’s revelation, though there are still some shocks that got some proper gasps from my cinema audience as well as a good peppering of jokes that work well in a crowd. In the end, as vicious as it can be, this is still a considerably gentler entry from Borgli than either of his previous two films, even down to an easily digestible ‘moral of the story’ at the end. All three of his works to date have been fascinating first-time watches, but The Drama might be the first one you’ll want to revisit after.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 