"The Drama" is Well-Made but Ill-Timed

[The following review contains minor spoilers]

When it comes to transgressive black comedies, they’re usually my bread and butter. Kristoffer Borgli’s previous film, Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage proved to be a perfect exercise in toe-the-line comedy, while also being largely inventive with its style and structure. In The Drama, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie, and Zendaya’s Emma are the happy wed-couple to be. That is, until they drunkenly admit the worst things they’ve ever done to their best man and maid of honor, which, by way of Emma’s admission, spirals their various relationships out of control; including their own. From a technical standpoint the film is whimsically edited, and paced beautifully. Unfortunately the elements of its subject matter that it chooses to satirize and make the butt of nearly every joke left a very sour taste in my mouth. Not to mention it claims a bit too much thematic relevancy to Borgli’s newly resurfaced May December essay...

I’m going to avoid spoiling major plot details as I always do, however, it’s impossible to discuss the film from here on out without working in more specific elements of Zendaya’s admission in the first act, and the implications it has on the rest of the film. These details aren’t technically public, but they’ve been leaked everywhere so here’s your warning.

In Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama, Zendaya’s character Emma admits in their drunken tell-all that when she was 15, she planned to carry out a school shooting using her Dad’s rifle. In theory this seems as if it would make for a really thoughtful, darkly humorous experiment on how far forgiveness and unconditional love can really go. But in the present day, Emma’s character has not a single individualized trait that defines her beyond “I used to be ugly”, and “I almost did a school shooting.” One could potentially make the argument that the lack of character development is intentional as to emphasize the toxicity of associating her with an element of her character that’s been irrelevant for fifteen years. But, if anything, her lack of depth makes you start to side with the people turning against her more, as they can’t seem to learn anything about her either. 

Pattinson’s character Charlie clearly has the most to do in the film, and his arc is the most consequential by far. It’s obvious that he cares deeply for Emma, and seeing other people’s opinions of her erode does offer some compelling commentary with regard to societal conditioning. But when the character who the suspense is built off of can’t amount to much, it’s hard to feel much for the characters besides the inevitable awkward cringe every few scenes. 

The edit here is by and large what makes most of the comedy that lands, stick the landing. There is one particular cut into the wedding portrait photography scene we’ve all seen in the promo that had everyone in my audience, including myself, in stitches. Daniel Pemberton’s score in the film compliments these moments nicely, but when thinking about his catalogue as a whole, it overall listens just as kind of a cliché compilation of what a listener would assume he would include. Lots of flutes, lots of deliberately uneven rhythms, the occasional violin string, you get the gist. 

Given the narrative details, you can probably infer that most of the satire and comedy is going to be centered around gun violence in America. While this is obviously not an inherent issue, the aspects of this subject that are the butts of the joke are far from the ones that should be. Very little attention is given to the societal systems that enable the endless cycle of gun violence to continue, in favor of just poking fun at how we interact with it, and tragedy as a whole in its both short term, and long term aftermath. 

Not to mention, that in addition to all of this, the film has multiple moments of Freudian imagery regarding Robert Pattinson walking hand in hand with fifteen year old Zendaya in the heart of her school shooter mania. These images particularly unsettled me due to the clear parallels of the recently resurfaced essay by director, Kristoffer Borgli regarding his deeply troubling May December relationship with a sixteen year old girl. 

This all brings me to my largest issue with the film: despite all of its technical flashiness and effective suspense, I could not shake the feeling that this whole film was merely a justification piece for Borgli to reckon with his own past. Which has previously worked for filmmakers that are trying to make statements criticizing decisions or choices they’ve made. However, when a filmmaker cites Woody Allen as his inspiration for justifying a pedophilic romance, and then makes a film about showing how much someone has changed from being sensationalized by school shooters, to being a mostly well-rounded person, my internal alarm bells went off.  

It’s clear that most of the general public will not be keyed into the controversy, and will not be focused on much of what has been discussed in this review, and the film will likely generate a definable fanbase. But, for my taste, this film offered a little too much on the nose of an “art imitating life” situation for me to be fully on board.