Kristoffer Borgli's deadpan comedy about extreme marital jitters would be as provocative as it wants to be it you could believe it.
‘The Drama’ Review: Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in a Half-Funny, Half-Baked Squirm Comedy of Extreme Marital Jitters ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ Broadway Review: Jon Bernthal Takes the Al Pacino Role in a Canny Piece of Stagecraft That Can’t Rival the Movie’s Haunting Power ‘The Last Critic’ Review: A Captivating Portrait of Robert Christgau, the Brilliant Mad Professor of Rock Critics, and How He Made the Grade ‘The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist’ Review: A Scary, Dizzying and Essential Deep Dive Into the AI Revolutiongives 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 aHe’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 at an upscale coffee bar. Charlie is pretending to have read the novel that Emma , 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 leapDenzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua's Hannibal Epic for Netflix Sets Summer Shoot in Italy 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 satireas 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 . 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 , drinking too much pink wine at the solitary table where they’re seated along with Charlie’s best man, the gregarious Mike , and Mike’s wife, the spiky Rachel , who’s the maid of honor. 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. But then Emma speaks up, and what she has to say floors everyone . Emma, as Zendaya plays her, comes off as a happy camper — the soul of eager, smiling, well-adjusted relatability. To Charlie , 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 , the plan of action, and the desire. 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 parlor 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 onecommit 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 traumatized, what we see is a lonely teenager, feeding on Internet memes , getting the fantasy in her head that maybe, just maybe, she has it within her to commit a horrifying crime. 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 unraveling. That. Given the holistic radiance of the Emma we see before us , that seems an unduly thin conceit.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 , our belief in what’s going on anchors the joke. That said, Borgli is a prankishly provocative filmmaker , 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 , there’s a lot of angst expressed in onscreen vomiting, and there is even a running ethical debate: IsZendaya 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-center stooge. But his performance comes into focus as the movie goes on, since it gives him more and more reason to fall apart. We realize how off the deep end he is when he makes an aggressive pass at his museum assistant, Misha , 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.”An A24 release of a Square Peg production. Producers: Lars Knudsen, Ari Aster, Tyler Campellone. 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