Movie review
How well do we know the person we’re planning to spend our lives with, and should we be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done, even if it happened before adulthood? Those are the questions asked by Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama,” in which Emma (Zendaya), days before her wedding to Charlie (Robert Pattinson), hesitantly reveals something shocking from her distant past. The news upends everything, and Charlie is left struggling to figure out how to go forward, how to try to forget, how — or whether — to adjust his image of his beautiful, perfect fiancée.
It’s a good idea for a movie, but “The Drama” doesn’t do anything interesting with its story; it’s far too busy trying to shock us. Borgli seems to want his audience on edge, to be creeped out by Emma’s deeply upsetting revelation, and so he fills the film with provocative flashback scenes, horrifying images and rather a lot of vomiting. (“The Drama” is not, I need not warn you, just a pretty wedding movie.) Despite some entertaining sequences — particularly an extremely cringey yet funny photo session postrevelation, with a photographer (a hilarious Zoë Winters) desperately trying to jolly this dour couple into Instagram-ready perfection — the film doesn’t have much to say about its central questions, and its ending feels inevitable but also unearned.
Too bad, because along the way Borgli squanders some fine performances. Alana Haim, as a maid of honor turned vengeful by Emma’s news, is both funny and scarily intense; her toast at the wedding is a small master class in how to say one thing and mean something else entirely. Pattinson’s Charles, at first entirely besotted, gazes at Emma as if she’s sunshine. In his wedding speech, which he rehearses with his best friend Mike (an excellent Mamoudou Athie), he says that Emma “turns my drama into comedy”; would that she could do that here. But it’s fascinating watching him in the film’s second half — you sense that this is a man for whom life has been uncomplicated, and that he genuinely lacks the tools to process what he’s learned.
And Zendaya, as always, lifts the movie higher. She’s got a rare naturalness on screen, in which her dialogue always seems to have just occurred to her. Emma is the sort of woman created for movies, with a glamorous job in publishing, a perfect apartment and uncanny beauty, and yet Zendaya sweetly breathes life into her. Listen to her, in an early scene flashing back to Emma and Charlie’s first date, sitting in a restaurant seeming lit by her smile. “What did you think of the ending?” she asks Charlie, about a book she think he’s read. “I feel like I didn’t get it.” Same, Emma. Same.
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