Movie review<\/h2>\n
How well do we know the person we\u2019re planning to spend our lives with, and should we be defined by the worst thing we\u2019ve ever done, even if it happened before adulthood? Those are the questions asked by Kristoffer Borgli\u2019s \u201cThe Drama,\u201d 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 \u2014 or whether \u2014 to adjust his image of his beautiful, perfect fianc\u00e9e.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a good idea for a movie, but \u201cThe Drama\u201d doesn\u2019t do anything interesting with its story; it\u2019s far too busy trying to shock us. Borgli seems to want his audience on edge, to be creeped out by Emma\u2019s deeply upsetting revelation, and so he fills the film with provocative flashback scenes, horrifying images and rather a lot of vomiting. (\u201cThe Drama\u201d is not, I need not warn you, just a pretty wedding movie.) Despite some entertaining sequences \u2014 particularly an extremely cringey yet funny photo session postrevelation, with a photographer (a hilarious Zo\u00eb\u00a0Winters) desperately trying to jolly this dour couple into Instagram-ready perfection \u2014 the film doesn\u2019t have much to say about its central questions, and its ending feels inevitable but also unearned.<\/p>\n
Too bad, because along the way Borgli squanders some fine performances. Alana Haim, as a maid of honor turned vengeful by Emma\u2019s 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\u2019s Charles, at first entirely besotted, gazes at Emma as if she\u2019s sunshine. In his wedding speech, which he rehearses with his best friend Mike (an excellent Mamoudou Athie), he says that Emma \u201cturns my drama into comedy\u201d; would that she could do that here. But it\u2019s fascinating watching him in the film\u2019s second half \u2014 you sense that this is a man for whom life has been uncomplicated, and that he genuinely lacks the tools to process what he\u2019s learned.<\/p>\n