DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. In the new movie titled "The Drama," Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play an engaged couple whose happiness is derailed by a secret from the past. It's the latest from the Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli who previously directed Nicolas Cage in the 2023 dark comedy "Dream Scenario." "The Drama" opens in theaters this week. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: In "The Drama," Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play Charlie and Emma, a Boston couple whose wedding day is fast approaching. The writer-director Kristoffer Borgli cleverly recaps their romance as a series of happy memories, some of which they plan to share with their friends and family members at the upcoming reception. One such memory is the first time they met in a bustling cafe. It involved a misunderstanding, plus a white lie and a bit of stalkerish behavior from Charlie. It wasn't too funny at the time, but two years later, they can laugh about it. Humor plays an important role in their relationship. In this scene, Charlie, who works as a curator for a Cambridge art museum, is complaining about a potentially problematic retrospective when Emma breaks the tension, as she often does, by pulling down his pants.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE DRAMA")
ROBERT PATTINSON: (As Charlie) I did. I said, if everyone knows he's a piece of [expletive], why are we doing a retrospective in the first place? It's, like, so incredibly irresponsible. No one ever cares until it's too late, and then it always ends up backfiring on me.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLOTHES RUSTLING)
PATTINSON: (As Charlie) Emma, I'm being serious. It's not funny.
ZENDAYA: (As Emma) No, I agree with you. This is not funny at all. It's very serious.
PATTINSON: (As Charlie, laughing).
ZENDAYA: (As Emma) You're laughing.
PATTINSON: (As Charlie) I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy.
CHANG: Most of "The Drama," though, concerns the kind of revelation that can't be so easily laughed off. One night, while Charlie and Emma are hanging out with their married friends, Rachel and Mike, they all wind up playing a boozy game of what's the worst thing you've ever done? Emma's answer is a doozy, and it's the big twist on which "The Drama" hinges. I won't give it away, but let's just say that it involves not something terrible that she did but something terrible that she almost did but decided against at the last minute. Emma's disclosure stops the merriment dead and throws her friends and her fiance for a loop. Rachel responds with particular outrage. She's played by Alana Haim in a much more ferocious performance than her star-making turn in "Licorice Pizza." And Pattinson is very good as Charlie, a loving groom-to-be who's suddenly engulfed by anxiety. In the days that follow, as the wedding countdown accelerates, Charlie finds himself wondering how well he truly knows the woman he's marrying.
The problem with "The Drama" is that it doesn't quite seem to know what to make of Emma either, even as it tries to account for how she could have come so close to doing what she didn't ultimately do. We see flashbacks featuring another actor, Jordyn Curet, as a 15-year-old Emma who experiences her share of depression and loneliness. But these scenes, which could be a mix of Emma's unreliable memories and Charlie's even less reliable hallucinations, feel like paint-by-numbers psychoanalysis. And although Zendaya's performance is skillful and empathetic, it's hard to connect her Emma to the younger version of the character. The movie's premise seldom feels like more than just a premise. I didn't believe that Emma could be capable - or even almost capable - of the horrific act in question.
Borgli previously made the 2023 film "Dream Scenario," which starred Nicolas Cage as a nebbishy university professor who inexplicably began haunting the dreams of those around him. Like "The Drama," it was a darkly amusing yet conceptually half-baked comedy about the power of suggestion and the ease of villainizing someone for something they didn't actually do. You could say both of these movies are loosely about cancel culture, something of which Borgli may have some firsthand knowledge. In 2012, he wrote an essay for a Norwegian magazine about his relationship with a teenage girl who was 10 years his junior, in which he sought to grapple with a long-standing taboo and defend his actions. That essay recently resurfaced online before the rollout of "The Drama," unsurprisingly stirring fresh waves of outrage.
Is humanity capable of authentic change or redemption? In a way, Borgli sidesteps that question. His great skill is for wringing tension, dread and squirm-inducing comedy from ugly situations. And "The Drama" is most successful not as a character study or a moral inquiry, but as a wedding stress movie. It's about the horrors of having to worry about DJs, photographers and florists when you're not even sure you're going to have a marriage at the end of the day. In a way, Borgli is trying to skewer the empty flash and pomp of certain social rituals, which serve only to keep us from really talking about the things that actually matter. He ends the movie on a faintly hopeful note that Charlie and Emma will ultimately move past this crisis, though he doesn't rule out the possibility that they might look back at their marriage and see it as the actual worst thing they've ever done.
BIANCULLI: Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed "The Drama" now out in theaters.
On Monday's show, Arsenio Hall, the late-night host who gave hip-hop its first home on television, sat with Magic Johnson as Magic told the world he had HIV, and helped propel Bill Clinton to the White House with one saxophone performance, opens up about why he walked away from the biggest dream of his life. I hope you can join us.
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(SOUNDBITE OF ERROLL GARNER'S "SOME OF THESE DAYS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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