DAN WEBSTER:
Some movies explore the lives of characters who are so emotionally complete, so mature and so well adjusted, that spending time with them feels less like an artistic exercise than it does, say, a relaxing session of restorative yoga—something that’s bound to ensure you a full eight hours of restful sleep.
The Drama, a movie written and directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, is NOT one of those movies.
Borgli’s movie is more likely to cause you to flinch and fidget in your seat and, at times, feel like arguing out loud with on-screen characters who, for much of the film, act like the polar opposite of well-adjusted people.
The two main ones are Emma and Charlie, played respectively by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. Emma and Charlie are Boston yuppies. (Though does anyone actually use that term anymore?) Whatever, they are young, professional urban-dwellers who live in a cool apartment, hold fancy jobs—she’s an editor, he’s a museum curator—and are preparing to get married.
The two seem besotted with one other. But what does that really mean? Because one evening, while arranging the wedding dinner menu with their friends Rachel and Mike (played respectively by Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), things begin to go awry. On impulse, they play a silly game whereby each one is challenged to name the worst thing he or she ever did.
And when it is Emma’s turn to speak, she admits to something that—for reasons that feel ridiculously exaggerated—causes Rachel to react angrily and Charlie to begin questioning whether he has made a mistake in allowing himself to get involved with a woman he may not even really know.
From there, Borgli—who tells his story in a non-chronological manner—crafts a plotline that is as much about Charlie’s essential weak-kneed character as it is any sort of statement about Emma’s supposed past worst action… an action that, as it turns out, Emma never committed anyway but rather just entertained as an angry teen’s reaction to schoolyard bullying.
We watch as Charlie slowly falls apart. He imagines Emma as a rebellious and dangerous teen, he seeks solace in a thoroughly inappropriate way with a co-worker (played by Hailey Gates), he stands by as Emma for reasons that don’t seem to make sense fires the wedding DJ, and he even delivers a devastating, drunken speech at the wedding dinner that earns him a bloody nose.
Then again, much of how Borgli presents all the characters—but especially Charlie—feels a bit off. For one thing, the way Charlie first meets Emma seems more creepy than cute. He spies her in a coffee shop, takes advantage of her momentary absence to take a photo of the book she is reading and then lies about having read it himself as a way to start a conversation.
His initial approach goes unnoticed because Emma—for reasons that become relevant later—is deaf in one ear. This makes him seem even more like an oaf instead of somebody that Emma—or any woman, for that matter—would find attractive. But what’s important is that their relationship begins with a lie, with Charlie dissembling in a way that anticipates his later actions.
Much of this, of course, is Borgli’s attempts to manipulate us. Rachel’s anger at Emma’s confession, which is portrayed well by the talented Haim, seems excessive, especially since her own so-called worst action is measurably worse. And Emma, too, acts irrationally, matching Charlie’s anxiety when her own frustrations become too great for her to handle.
And because of these manipulations, The Drama ends up being a relationship study that is difficult to take seriously. Not, in any event, as seriously as other relationship-issue films deserve to be—Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story serving as a prime example.
The Drama, then, is a well-acted exercise built around a situation that is too fictional to believe, one in which the word love is uttered ad nauseum when the operative word should be trust. Because without mutual trust, in real life or the movies, even the happiest looking couples are bound to flinch and fidget their way to an early exit.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
