In “The Drama,” a squirm comedy that’s supposed to hinge on the ultimate case of marital jitters, Robert Pattinson gives one of the twitchiest performances in the history of twitchy performances. Oh sure, Dennis Hopper was twitchier in “Apocalypse Now” — and so was Nicolas Cage spasming and blowing fuses in “Vampire’s Kiss.” But here’s the thing: Pattinson is supposed to be playing a normal person.
He’s Charlie, a British yuppie museum curator who is about to be married, and who will soon be given good reason to walk around in a state of nervous wreckage. Yet Pattinson, sallow and moody, hair hanging in his face, peering through glasses with antic gloom, is twitchy from the very first scene — a meet-cute set (where else?) at an upscale coffee bar. Charlie is pretending to have read the novel that Emma (Zendaya), seated at the window counter, is immersed in. That’s a ruse you could imagine seeing in an old Hugh Grant movie, but Pattinson invests it with stalker energy. You want to tell the character, “If you’re going to leap this far into deception to meet a girl, at least relax about it.”
Charlie isn’t the only one twitching; the whole movie is. The writer-director, Kristoffer Borgli, who made the very good body-horror-meets-media-narcissism satire “Sick of Myself,” as well as the very weird Nicolas Cage comedy “Dream Scenario,” shoots that meet-cute as if he were doing a remake of Godard’s “Breathless.” It’s all staged with hyper-realistic lighting and enough jump-cuts to suggest that something momentous is going on. Borgli is a gifted filmmaker, but in “The Drama” he never stops jumping around — back in time, and also within scenes, all to hook us into a note of toxic anxiety. He succeeds, but the mix of tones is unnerving and, at times, a bit baffling. Are we supposed to be cracking up, or sucking in our breath as the hero’s sanity cracks?
Charlie and Emma become a couple, their relationship captured in flash-cut montages (hot sex, laughing, lolling about). The film then leaps ahead to their wedding. A week before the big event, they’re testing out wedding-menu choices at the reception locale (they settle on the mushroom risotto), drinking too much pink wine at the solitary table where they’re seated along with Charlie’s best man, the gregarious Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Mike’s wife, the spiky Rachel (Alana Haim), who’s the maid of honour. The four start to play a game: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? One of them comes up with a doozy: Rachel once found herself in a cabin in the woods with a mentally impaired boy, and he was so annoying she locked him in the cabin closet and left him there. Screaming. As worst things you’ve ever done go, that’s pretty bad. (That Rachel is still self-righteous about it makes it worse.)
But then Emma speaks up, and what she has to say floors everyone (and not in a good way). Emma, as Zendaya plays her, comes off as a happy camper — the soul of eager, smiling, well-adjusted relatability. To Charlie (and us), she seems a total catch. But guess what? At the table, Emma confesses that when she was 15, shy and isolated, in the throes of being bullied at school, she nearly committed a school shooting. She had the gun (her father’s shotgun), the plan of action, and the desire. She was gonna do it! (She practised with the shotgun, which caused her to become deaf in one ear.) Circumstances intervened, however, and she didn’t. But as soon as she tells this story, everyone at the table is shell-shocked. Especially Charlie. They were playing a mischievous parlour game, and suddenly he’s gripped by the fear that he’s about to marry a psychopath.
That’s the concept of “The Drama,” and from the start it’s at once prickly, amusing, and not entirely convincing. Simple question: How does one almost commit a school shooting? I get that the film is putting this forth as an edgy comic device. But even as “The Drama” flashes back to Emma’s adolescence, where she’s played by Jordyn Curet, who makes her convincingly unhappy and traumatised, what we see is a lonely teenager, feeding on Internet memes (and real-life events), getting the fantasy in her head that maybe, just maybe, she has it within her to commit a horrifying crime.
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I can imagine a teenager today feeling that way. But that’s not the same as saying “she almost did it,” which, to be honest, is kind of a dumb idea. I didn’t buy it — and it wouldn’t be necessary to buy it if the movie simply showed us that Charlie, freaked out by this revelation from his fiancé’s past, was triggered into having a neurotic unravelling. That is what happens, but the film also wants to say that…she really almost did it. Given the holistic radiance of the Emma we see before us (not to mention the fact that female shooters are extremely rare), that seems an unduly thin conceit.
That said, the deadpan satirical mechanism of “The Drama” is that Charlie gradually is going to fall apart. And Pattinson is certainly accomplished at moving from twitchy to twitchier, playing the whole thing as a compulsively rational dialogue with himself. Does Charlie now truly want to marry Emma? Are his fears justified? Or is what he’s experiencing a hyperbolic version of the wedding anxiety — the wedding drama — that’s ordinary because on some level it’s primal?
I sound like I’m doing that foolhardy thing of nitpicking the “plausibility” of a black comedy. But when a comedy is made in as clinical a psychodramatic mode as “The Drama” is (Borgli, who’s from Norway, directs with Scandinavian vérité), our belief in what’s going on anchors the joke. That said, Borgli is a prankishly provocative filmmaker (“Sick of Myself” was about someone mutilating herself to get attention; it also referenced a school shooting), and the way he gradually ups the cringe-comedy factor in “The Drama” keeps us watching. Some of the movie is an acid satire of pre-wedding rituals — like the first dance that Charlie and Emma are dutifully rehearsing for, with a ridiculously stern taskmaster of a coach. Unsettling things happen (like Emma overseeing their DJ smoking heroin in the street), there’s a lot of angst expressed in onscreen vomiting, and there is even a running ethical debate: Is almost committing a mass shooting worse than actually locking a kid in a closet?
Zendaya is in full charisma here, though I wish her character were written with more of a hint of a present-tense dark side. She’s essentially playing the straight woman, and it’s Pattinson’s Charlie, losing his shit, who’s the front-and-centre stooge. But his performance comes into focus as the movie goes on, since it gives him more and more reason to fall apart. We realise how off the deep end he is when he makes an aggressive pass at his museum assistant, Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), which helps set up the culminating farce of the wedding sequence — which, after all the film’s dithering and contrivance, turns out to be a climax that delivers. You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In “The Drama” he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”
From Variety US