'The Drama' Review: Zendaya & Robert Pattinson in Gimmicky Dramedy
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in 'The Drama.'
Courtesy of A24
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Boston couple Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are beautiful and cool (in an upscale bohemian-intellectual way) and madly in love. Though we see the awkward first beginnings of their relationship — Charlie’s early, fumbling attempts at wooing Emma — those are just the cute anecdote parts of a romantic success story. When The Drama opens, Emma and Charlie are about to get married. They’ve a few final hurdles to clear, like locking down the menu for the wedding reception and writing their vows, but they are essentially at the finish line, the end credits about to roll as they stroll off into the rest of their life together.
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This being a Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario) film, though, we can guess that wedded bliss will not be easily won — if it’s won at all. Borgli makes uneasy, dark comedies about regular-ish bourgeois lives coming undone. In the case of The Drama, strife arrives during a friendly if charged party game. Emma and Charlie are drunk on their caterer’s wine samples — they’d like to try just one more glass of the skin-contact, please — with their best friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and her husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie). Rachel goads them all into divulging the worst thing they’ve ever done. It will bond them, clear the air before Emma and Charlie take the plunge. Mike’s worst thing is a failure of chivalry, Rachel’s a bit of cruelty from her childhood, Charlie’s is a relatively anodyne internet misadventure, and Emma’s is…
The Drama
The Bottom Line
Great invite, shame about the party.
Release date: Friday, April 3
Cast: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamoudou Athie
Writer and director: Kristoffer Borgli
1 hour 45 minutes
Well, as the trailers for the film suggest, what Emma reveals is shocking. I don’t want to give away exactly what she tells the group, but I will have to allude to it vaguely going forward, so stop here if you are particularly spoiler averse.
What Emma unearths from her past suggests a different person altogether from the woman Charlie knows and loves. It involves a threat of violence born of a troubled mind. Charlie and Mike are flabbergasted, Rachel is horrified. The rest of Borgli’s film exists in the fallout of Emma’s bombshell, tracing Charlie’s mounting insecurity about his impending commitment to someone he suddenly fears is a stranger, one possessed of unfathomable grim secrets.
Or, at least, that’s what the set-up of The Drama promises — an edgy, provocative look at how a relationship might weather the intrusion of a distinctly American pathology. In disappointing reality, though, the film is merely a differently dressed rehash of very familiar material. It’s a deceptively simple dramedy of cold feet, of pre-wedding jitters, only given the stain of higher-minded, more piercing social inquiry. What Emma specifically discloses ultimately doesn’t matter.
Though Zendaya is billed first in the film, the movie really belongs to Pattinson. Charlie is, after all, the one reacting to new information, messily processing things while Emma passively waits for him to come around or bolt. Even in the scenes when the two are together — a comically ill-timed meeting with a wedding photographer, several fraught conversations in their lovely home — Charlie’s perspective is favored. Because, I suppose, he is a stand-in for us in the audience, collectively participating in a what-would-you-do thought experiment.
Pattinson gives a natural, appealing performance, convincingly playing a relatively normal guy (Charlie works in the back office of an art museum in Cambridge, a job that suggests a creative passion that is never expanded upon) who begins to realize that his comfortable life with his quirky dream girl is not nearly as settled, or normal, as he once thought. We don’t know many details about him, but I suppose that is Borgli’s intention. It is easier for viewers to graft themselves onto the character when he’s mostly a blank.
Though we do learn more particular bits about Emma, all of which are delicately sussed out by Zendaya, she too is a cipher. Borgli seems too busy tending to his precious concept to breathe individual life into the world of his film. There is something disma