The Drama is an Uneasy Comedy About the Limits of Forgiveness
Red flags and hairpin turns mark a couple’s twisted path to the altar in Kristoffer Borgli’s darkly funny romance.
Lesson number-one for prospective brides and grooms: if you feel tempted to play a game of Truth-or-Dare right before your wedding day, just don’t. Emma and Charlie learn that lesson the hard way in The Drama, a wickedly funny comedy from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself).
The engaged couple, truth be told, play a slightly different game of true confessions. It goes horribly awry after one of them spills a revelation too shocking and disturbing to ignore.
The confession lights a fast-burning fuse on a stick of dynamite that might blow up the happy couple’s special day, and their whole relationship. Will they or won’t they stay together to make it down the aisle?
Up until the bombshell confession, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) seem to enjoy the process of prepping for their big day — as much as anyone could enjoy what appears to be an endless succession of customer service consultations conducted with life-or-death seriousness.
The film spends its briskly edited first act as a comedy of manners, sharply satirizing the trappings of modern wedding ceremonies. The speeches and rehearsals, photos and flowers, everything must be considered and decided, and of course, funded.
Through it all, Emma and Charlie have each other’s back, as in the scene when they rehearse their first dance with a ridiculously uncompromising dance instructor (Celia Rowlson-Hall). Two seemingly well-adjusted young Boston professionals in love, they appear to stand on a solid foundation of trust and affection.
We get to see where their sweet romance first bloomed, as Charlie, preparing his speech for the wedding reception, flashes back to their awkward “meet-cute” at a coffee shop. They actually refer to it as a “meet-cute,” firmly establishing their awareness (i.e., the filmmaker’s awareness) of the rom-com tropes the film seeks to subvert in its second half.
One of those reliable conventions would be the his-and-hers sidekick characters, friends in either corner to serve as sounding boards, voices of wisdom or imprudence, and, of course, comic relief. Here, that falls to the couple’s married friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), who actually kick off the fateful game of confessions that blows up in all their faces.
Athie and Haim do not register as the most credible married couple, but, as a comic duo, Athie works well playing reserved straight man to Haim’s far more emphatic loose cannon.
Her Rachel turns out to be the one among them who finds the confessed sin utterly unforgivable, a self-righteous stance that Haim overacts, particularly in a pivotal later scene. Yet, she’s undeniably amusing putting over Rachel’s passive-aggressive pettiness.
Just flat-out funny is Zoë Winters, following up her breakout supporting role in Materialists with a brief turn here as Emma and Charlie’s prospective wedding photographer, who stays committed to capturing the couple’s bliss even when it’s clear bad blood is brewing.
Can their impending wedding day be saved? The film generates enough suspense in the matter to keep us hoping with every lovestruck glance, and cringing with every misstep. Zendaya and Pattinson, like their counterparts Athie and Haim, don’t melt the screen with sexual chemistry, but they sell the romance, and Emma and Charlie’s heartfelt desire to be together.
Pattinson, in particular, shows a steady hand with the comedy of escalating emotions, as Charlie and Emma’s paranoia and insecurity spiral out of control, and the movie dives into subjects that generally are not funny in the slightest.
Perhaps in the interest of keeping it funny, those subjects are handled without much nuance or genuine sensitivity. Borgli seems more interested in the shock value of it all, and in balancing the tone of a wedding comedy wading through deadly serious territory to make it to the altar.
For the most part, Borgli pulls off the difficult sleight of hand, marrying modern romance to devilishly dark comedy in warmhearted harmony, till death do they part.
The Drama (★★★☆☆) is rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
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