RATING
Director(s): Kristoffer Borgli
Country: United States
Author: Kristoffer Borgli
Actor(s): Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim
Written by Tom Augustine
It’s either a diabolical piece of cross-marketing or one of the more devastating moments of life imitating art in recent memory — just days before the release of Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, which represents a moment of ascension for the filmmaker with the backing of A24 and two of the biggest stars on the planet, a compromising piece of information has surfaced from his past. Like The Drama, this piece of kompromat was even more remarkable for the fact that it was offered up by the subject themselves. As with Zendaya’s Emma, who drunkenly confesses a relationship-altering detail days before her wedding, it was Borgli himself who penned an essay back in 2012 detailing his ‘May-December’ relationship with a sixteen-year-old when the director was twenty-seven. In his home-country of Norway, this is technically legal, but extremely ethically dubious. Like Emma’s admission in The Drama, it is a revelation that doesn’t cross prosecutorial boundaries, per se, but forever changes the way you’ll look at said person. The parallels were almost too striking to be taken seriously — could it be, as some have speculated, an act of self-immolation as viral marketing? Could the essay’s references to following the advice of known creeps Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld over that of his friends be taken at face value? It was all so on-the-nose that some skepticism could be warranted — but no one would willingly offer themselves up to the slaughter in such a way, right?
Borgli comes from an advertising background, where there’s no such thing as bad press, after all. His previous works — which include Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario, two films that skewer the social neuroses of the attention economy and cancel culture, respectively — employ hammer-blunt, Ruben Östlund-style commentary in service of cringing, shudder-inducing comedy. An identifiable thread in these films, and The Drama, is the fallibility of ‘judgement’, the way in which we are compelled (encouraged, even) to jump on the bandwagon of condemnation despite our own flaws which, up until the moment, have not themselves emerged into the light. In the case of Dream Scenario, two thirds of a very good picture, such an approach served to dilute the potency of the film’s intriguing, surreal setup, in which a regular schlub starts appearing, for no apparent reason, in everyone else’s dreams. For a logline with such rich dramatic potential, to see the film inevitably wend toward predictable, mundane commentary is perhaps reflective of the state of our current society, but hardly illuminating. With The Drama, Borgli is more interested in prodding at these notions of judgement and cancel culture to explore the limits of how much we can ever really know each other, and the stories we tell ourselves to make everything okay. It’s a film with no shortage of compelling provocations, but as with Dream Scenario, Borgli never quite locates those depths he so desperately seeks.
Assuredly directed and frequently provocative, Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli levels-up his signature brand of cringe comedy with this biting relationship drama starring two of the biggest Hollywood names of a generation. It is a film that certainly doesn’t lack for intriguing ideas, but ultimately fails to fulsomely investigate them.
Zendaya stars alongside Robert Pattinson, who plays Charlie, her fiance. Both exist in a bourgeois, metropolitan American arts sphere, cloistered from the poverty and excess of the wider American project but also beholden to it — and, in Emma’s case, trying to escape its darkest reaches. Strangely, The Drama’s upper class enclaves of spacious urban apartments and sleek office spaces reminded me most of Joachim Trier, whose classily unobtrusive worlds of comfort provide a strange tension that neither director seems quite capable of acknowledging or properly unpacking. Charlie and Emma’s wedding is on fast approach — there’s an excessively chirpy photographer to wrangle, speeches to write, a first dance to learn. Early on in the film, functioning as a kind of warning sign of what is to come, Emma and Charlie are on their way home when they spot their wedding DJ seemingly smoking crack across the street. This anxiety is carried into a menu tasting across from their Best Man and Maid of Honour, Mike and Rachel (Mamadou Athie and Alana Haim), themselves a couple and friends of Charlie. Emma’s past is somewhat mysterious, as is the fact that she is deaf in one ear. Then comes the film’s driving incident — Mike and Rachel introduce the idea of revealing ‘the worst thing you’ve ever done’ as an essential pre-wedding ritual, prompting each member of the party to reveal their most dastardly deeds. Mike’s is bad in a funny, self-deprecating way. Rachel’s is worse, but largely the kind of intimate fact that friends tend to dismiss. Charlie, a nebbish, milquetoast kind of guy, tellingly seems unable to think of something. Then comes Emma.
It is at this point that I must proffer a spoiler warning — it is not entirely possible for me to critique what comes after without delving into the complexities of the topic at hand, but the tension building utilised toward the reveal is essential to this scene, the film’s finest. After the reveal, the film gradually loses its sense of ‘anything can happen’ spontaneity, opting instead for a downhill descent that ultimately turns somewhat predictable — though there are distinct pleasures to be had along the way. So, here is your moment to step away, watch the film, and return.
In a moment of alcohol-fuelled dam-busting, Emma offers up the secret to her very being, the root cause of the person she has since become, and one which she hasn’t shared with anyone. As a teen, she planned to stage a school shooting, and was only ultimately thwarted when someone else conducted one nearby, essentially stealing her thunder and prompting a total reassessment. Borgli delights in uncovering Emma’s dark past, as cunningly executed flashbacks reveal a moody, awkward teen loner far removed from the graceful and personable woman she would grow into, experimenting goofily with the ‘aesthetic’ of the school shooter — all world-weary detachment, emo costuming and photobooth confessionals, middle finger raised to the world. In a country as perverse as the United States, it is a persona defined enough to be recognisable and repeatable, something that Borgli humorously utilises to muddy the waters of Charlie’s perception of a woman he’s sure he loves, and knows intimately. From there, our point of view is largely (though not solely) Charlie’s, and Borgli’s clever editing scheme leads to a range of pointed, outrageous gags and quite-funny visual and aural metaphors — a favourite of mine being Charlie mentally revisiting his happiest memories with Emma, only to find this Emma is now played by the actress who embodies young, school shooter-era Emma (Jordyn Curet, very good).
Borgli’s intentions here are clear, but his ability to fulsomely investigate the ideas he’s introduced is less so. Borgli instinctively sides with the cancelled party, and it is a feature, not a bug of The Drama that we are constantly trying to ascertain whether Borgli is genuine about his characters’ plight or has made them pawns in his gleefully infernal social commentary machines. He is ably matched by his stars — Pattinson’s now well-established capacity to move from straight man to total buffoon is part of what ensures our investment in the couple’s trajectory, while Zendaya’s performance is carefully calibrated to suggest depths that we will never quite access. We can never know someone fully — but could violence lurk within someone so clearly harmless? It is an intriguing proposition, but one that also exposes The Drama’s, and Borgli’s, fatal flaw. This is a film that is not exclusively about a couple’s woeful wedding — Borgli clearly has thoughts he wants to share about human nature and American culture, where both neurotic, internet-fuelled judgmentalism and the conditions in which school shootings happen regularly exist side by side.
What Borgli is less qualified (or interested) in discussing, is the question of race. And yet, no story set in America can exist outside of that: the absence of race throughout The Drama is as much of an (unintentional) commentary as if Borgli were to focus exclusively on this aspect. Zendaya, and Emma, are mixed-race — Emma’s father is a black military man who appears in a single, illuminating scene. The only other prominent black person in the sheltered, bougie life that Emma and Charlie lead is Athie’s Mike, whom Rachel has an affection for due to her perception that he is ‘harmless’ and fears violence due to a street upbringing. This revealing detail about the nature of Mike and Rachel’s relationship is suggestive, but feels almost incidental, as though Borgli wasn’t especially conscious of the undertone. Borgli’s colourblind assessment of these people (with the implication being that we’re all kind of like this) is that they are so caught up in their own narratives that they unintentionally wound and invalidate the people around them. Likewise, Charlie initially sees Emma as a docile creature, only to contend with her potential for madness, threatening to unravel the relationship they’ve achieved together. The school shooter ‘persona’ is almost exclusively white and male. Borgli’s introduction of a mixed-race female school shooter is an original one in a major motion picture, yes, but one that never feels like it’s been considered in its entirety. What does it mean for a young woman of colour in America to so fully identify with the signifiers of a very white American pastime? There are intriguing ideas at play there, but Borgli never makes us feel like selecting Zendaya for this role is anything other than a juvenile ‘what if’, a writing exercise (‘But what if it wasn’t the white guy who was the school shooter, but his black fiance?’, one imagines the pitch going). There is a scene in which a younger Emma explains to her school friends that there have been women shooters in the past — but the race of said women is never mentioned. Indeed, the entire film goes to pains to avoid mentioning it — to the point where I found myself waiting for some gesture, even a half-assed one, only to come away lacking. By film’s end, in a conclusion that strains for something like redemption for both characters, it is this lack of consideration on the part of both the film’s makers, and those that claim to know Emma, that makes us feel like we still haven’t really seen her at all.
The Drama (dir. Kristoffer Borgli) is in cinemas now.