When we talk about Robert Pattinson and Zendaya’s new movie The Drama, we’re going to have to keep it relatively abstract.
That’s not because there’s little to say about the pseudo rom-com, actual psychological endurance test from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli.
In fact, there’s a near-endless level of discourse just waiting to be had — both about the bait-and-switch experience that scores of filmgoers expecting a cute date-night movie are about to have, and the incoming tidal wave of outrage around Borgli’s borderline cavalier treatment of an incredibly serious real-life issue.
But we have to be more than a bit circumspect there. Because in an example of genius movie marketing rivalling only Longlegs‘ heart-monitor theatrics, production company A24 has kept the turn in this movie mostly hidden — all while teasing the rose-coloured, impossibly charismatic romance between this year’s two biggest stars.
In fact, it may have kept the secret too well. Because even though The Drama blossoms into an incredibly interesting and subversive investigation into the terminal limits of empathy and redemption, that may not even matter. All that will matter instead is the bewildered disappointment theatre-goers will feel walking out of a film they expected to be like Sleepless in Seattle, but that instead feels closer in spirit to Midsommar.
WATCH | The Drama trailer:
What eagle-eyed watchers of the film’s trailer do know is this: Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are deeply in love. After a meet-cute in a typically upscale Boston cafe, we see it’s — as Bilal Baig so insightfully put it in the CBC show Sort Of — that carefree, uncomplicated “Rachel McAdams love,” the kind that leads to arm-in-arm bookstore dates, inside jokes at dance class and impromptu make-out sessions after-hours at the museum.
And as these young, impossibly beautiful — and improbably financially secure — lovers’ wedding day approaches, it’s all so sweet and easy it starts to get confusing. Is it really possible to make a movie where nothing goes wrong, everyone’s happy and things just sort of float along in a sea of bottomless orange wine and fiddle-leaf figs?
The answer, of course, is no. But it’s the scale and sudden severity of the “no” that is shocking; it’s a brutal, jolting switch-up that comes at a particularly boozy dinner between Charlie, Emma and their best man/maid-of-honour couple Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie).
The jolt comes midway-through a drunken game, where everyone is asked to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s the sort of game everyone else at the table knows only requires lightly traumatizing stories, relatively minor transgressions that are just provocative enough to bring out a laugh.
Nothing is as beyond-the-pale and somewhat sickening as what Emma offers — a disclosure so off-putting and off-colour that it not only blows up the dinner, but also their friendship, and threatens to blow up Emma and Charlie’s wedding, set to take place in just a few days.
Troubling themes
This is where it gets tricky. Because what Emma reveals is truly a bombshell that sets up the conceit to follow, where Charlie — and by extension, the audience — is asked to empathize with a type of person who’s among the most difficult to empathize with in the current political landscape.
Assuming The Drama picks up the kind of attention Pattinson and Zendaya — who also both star in two other other gigantic projects, Dune: Part Three and The Odyssey, later this year — typically command, it’s certain to inspire a slew of think pieces.
Serious examinations into how — and whether — director Borgli thought through the implications of asking for compassion for this specific type of character. Questions around whether you should tell stories about these types of characters with this amount of humanization. And critiques of how shallow a movie that fails to indict them is.
Also, critiques of how offensive it is include this theme at all surrounded by absurdist, uncomfortable comedy — especially coming, as it does, from a director currently at the centre of a controversy for a 2012 essay in which he wrote about recalibrating his moral compass to date a 17-year-old when he was 27.
But those questions can’t really be broached here, as the absolute best way to go into The Drama is blind to where the chips fall. Though that may unfortunately be the film’s biggest obstacle in actually garnering traction; after the initial surge of shock dies down, The Drama may prove too specific in tone and message to make much of an impression at all.
Because along with an intentionally aloof narrative style (we frequently dip into and out of hypotheticals; we constantly see characters’ imaginings of how they’d like to respond before we’re jarringly brought back to reality) the tone here is all over the place.
After that first reveal, The Drama settles into that unsettling genre of humour more typical of Curb Your Enthusiasm or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia than a blockbuster romance. Similar to the much-reviled (though actually interesting) After the Hunt, it shows terrible people doing terrible things to one another, in terribly public settings, with seemingly no hope of redemption or personal improvement.
Every laugh is mined from the excruciating pain our characters put one another through, and every choice they make seems designed to follow that old writing maxim: Bad decisions make good stories.
Watch-through-your-fingers
But good stories, as The Drama shows, are rarely comforting ones — and even more rarely universally beloved. Forget a firestorm; Pattinson and Zendaya’s morose, squirm-inducing, watch-through-your-fingers-style comedy stands a greater chance of alienating mainstream audiences than enraging them.
That could alienate them in a way comparable to last year’s Materialists, the Celine Song-directed follow-up to her electric and endearing romance Past Lives. A film that, instead of revelling in a similar depiction of love as her previous release, proved to be such an intentionally wooden deconstruction of romance that many of Song’s past fans simply labelled it “broke man propaganda,” left a bad review and walked away.
But however divisive — or ignored — The Drama ends up being, it won’t remove its value. It boasts surprising bravery in exploring the moral complexity of those we often deem irredeemable — at least when that subject matter is being dealt with straight. It broaches the never-more-unpopular sentiment of defending and finding sympathy for those who have done horrible things in the past, and who may well still deserve condemnation for it in the present.
And it attempts to unpack how easily evil thoughts can fester in those who feel cut off from an otherwise inclusive community — and how quickly those thoughts can fade when people are instead made to feel valued.
It’s still imperfectly done, at times feeling unfinished. A number of dangling, uninvestigated plot threads are left hanging, and certain provocations feel included simply for provocation’s sake.
Meanwhile, our two “heroes” stumble through a series of comically stupid choices, always managing to hurt one another through their infuriating immaturity and selfishness.
Coming to a conclusion on which is truly the villain will likely divide those who end up sitting through the whole thing. Is it the guilt-ridden Emma, stubbornly ignoring her past? Or is it her supposed lover and confidant Charlie, who fails at every turn to accept her for who she is and was?
Or audiences might just decide they’re both villains, and walk out long before the credits roll.
