“The Drama” Review: To Love Despite One Gargantuan Flaw
“I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy.”
Charlie (Robert Pattinson) goes over his speech with his best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) in the impeccably decorated apartment he and his fiancée Emma (Zendaya) share. Charlie remembers when Emma panted him in the middle of a serious rant, her cute yet abrasive laughter, major memories, tiny quirks. To be known is to be loved, after all, and in knowing her, Charlie cannot wait to marry his life partner, the one who finds levity in life’s heaviest moments.
In “The Drama,” director Kristoffer Borgli attempts to do the same with a shockingly dark sense of humor. Less than a week away from their special day, Charlie, Emma, Mike, and his partner and Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) talk over wine about a peculiar sighting: their DJ casually taking hard drugs on the street.
“I don’t want to dismiss her because of one thing, you know?” says Emma.
It’s an idea that seems ludicrous to the rest of this intimate ensemble, one that prompts a discussion of the worst thing each has ever done. Emma, the most seemingly empathetic of the group up to this point, states the most unforgivable act: planning a school shooting in high school to never be carried out, buried until this very moment.
The moment is wildly uncomfortable, or funny in its blasphemy—or maybe you’re strictly laughing out of discomfort; you don’t know. There’s a feeling in your stomach you can’t quite place that grows stronger as you’re pulled into Charlie's paranoia. He tries to grapple with this new understanding of his bride to be with comical neuroses. Robert Pattinson realizes this jumpy intellectual fully into a highly believable and engaging individual, even without much context beyond his relationship with Emma and the immediate situation. Dramatically ironic dialogue surrounding a test wedding shoot and a surprise book of editorial gun photography are exceptionally hilarious. But the joke gets less funny every time it’s said.
His mind travels to liminal places and gruesome fantasies, like his wedding party massacred, or overlooking the water besides Emma's teenage self. These inserts are sudden like his own psychology. Similarly, sound jumps and flatlines, builds and thins, carrying the ear Emma deafened in shooting practice to stylistic fruition. Joshua Raymond Lee’s work is an artful delve into a unique mental state caught between increased moral acuity and adoration.
That being said, Emma’s own interiority is far more interesting, yet criminally unexplored. Zendaya is held back by the script from fleshing out its most complex character by far. As a mixed woman, she’s not the picture you’d expect to find by the dictionary definition of “school shooter.” Combined with her military father, it prompts a rich conversation about American culture that is merely skimmed. However, the tidbits you do get are morbidly engrossing. Emma throws in that she liked the “shooter aesthetic” online without further explanation. Charlie outwardly contemplates mass shootings’ pervasiveness potentially causing many people like Emma to walk amongst us, then pivots to awkwardly cornering Rachel’s cousin—a paraplegic victim—on the street in an unprompted defense of his fiancée, another supposedly humorous gag that’s excruciating. Of course this thing was produced by Ari Aster.
Ultimately, the major tumor of this tale is that the cataclysmic event of choice simply isn’t compatible with the dark romantic comedy Borgli aims to tell. Although thoughtfully bridged by Rachel and Mike’s varying points of view, wrangling this sociopolitical behemoth ultimately overpowers the themes of love, true intimacy, and forgiveness that would otherwise be its hyper focused thesis. Because of this, when Charlie does something relevantly unforgivable that culminates in a third-act blowup that ruins their marriage right at its start, you simply don’t care. It reads as cheap fodder.
So, you relish in the scenes capturing a relationship predicating that darkness, ones that pinpoint the actual point in the first place. Zendaya and Pattinson’s chemistry further illuminates brightly lit, modern spaces impeccably shot by Arseni Khachaturan on 35 mm. They’re both energetic, adventurous, sharp, and passionate, and it’s quite easy to see why they chose each other.
Their meet-cute is a microcosm of their intended story. Charlie spots Emma in a modern Cambridge coffee shop and is immediately enamored, looks up the book she’s reading on Goodreads, awkwardly goes up to her multiple times without her notice, and starts rambling rather unsexily until she finally pulls the earbud from her one working ear. Graciously, Emma tells Charlie to start again. Charlie remarks how he loves the book he didn’t know the existence of until a couple minutes ago, and thus commences a true connection founded on a lie.
Charlie is undeniably in Emma’s throws. It’s hard to deny a person—or a film—that causes you to experience the entire range of emotion.