Filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli is a torture comic with a purpose. He digs into our insecurities hoping to unearth an excuse to grant ourselves some grace.
“Dream Scenario,” the Norwegian writer-director’s strong American debut, starred Nicolas Cage as an anonymous schlub who goes viral when strangers report seeing him in their sleep; the head rush of notoriety causes him to wreck his life. Borgli’s latest, “The Drama,” aims its humiliation at an engaged couple named Emma and Charlie (Zendaya and Robert Pattinson). One week before the wedding, their married friends, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), pressure them to name the worst thing they’ve ever done. The drunken confessional is a great scene, with Haim’s infuriating busybody cranking up the tension until it explodes in tears and vomit.
What the mortified Emma admits that she almost did is so unexpected, so extreme, that I’ll merely reveal that it’s violent and very Gen Z and that, as lurid as it is, Borgli isn’t especially interested in it. He uses shock tactics the way little children throw lollipops onto anthills — he just wants to cause a stir. If his apathy offends anyone in the audience, I suspect he doesn’t care about that, either. I feel equally detached about his coldly amusing film but I admire his intentions.
His focus is on the fallout. Pattinson’s groom, a mealy and anxious fibber, is terrified to potentially walk down the aisle with a nut job, rewinding through his memories to find evidence that his fiancée is damaged goods. Meanwhile, the bride is helpless to defend a version of herself she swears she hasn’t been since her teens. “The Drama” can’t quite hurdle Zendaya’s innate likability. We get impatient with everyone making her suffer. When her Emma tries to explain that she was a high school outcast, none of her friends believe it and even the scene itself cuts away like it would rather not press the point.
That young and vulnerable Emma, played by a compelling Jordyn Curet, haunts the film in flashbacks and hallucinations. Pattinson’s Charlie imagines standing next to Curet in the couple’s practice wedding photos, the cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan getting across in a single image that marriage challenges us to commit to all of a person, not just the good parts we’ve met.
Should Emma and Charlie go ahead and get married? Honestly, who cares? We never know enough about them to pass judgment. To another screenwriter, “The Drama” would be an intimate study and a more emotionally wrenching film. But Borgli forces us to parse the mushy stuff from the mess and analyze the pending nuptials as an impersonal problem: What comes after a public shaming for the guilty and the inquisitors? That’s one of the most important (and unresolved) questions of the modern era, so I’ll forgive the filmmaker for being no more interested in writing Emma and Charlie as complex human beings than if they were character names in a math quiz about two people on two trains speeding toward a crash.
As the pair spins out, others whirl into their maelstrom, including an extended bit from one of my favorite supporting actors, Hailey Benton Gates, who specializes in worker bees you don’t want to bug. Emma and Charlie are dizzied by the wedding industrial complex, with its parade of chirpy, pushy florists and photographers and dance coaches who behave like their corner of the upcoming party is the centerpiece of the night. I howled at Jeremy Levick’s disc jockey, who barges in and disrupts the action, muttering bland things about his cables. His inanities are somehow funnier than a stand-up’s honed act.
Charlie is apparently an art museum curator (the production design hangs neat stuff on their apartment walls) and Emma does something or another in another office. But it’s Pattinson and Zendaya’s chemistry as actors we’re invested in, more than their actual roles. They’re good foils for each other — both can take and give a lot of punishment without trying to sway the audience to their side.
A generous scene partner, Pattinson seems to enjoy playing puny dudes run ragged by women with a more vast and treacherous emotional landscape. (See also last year’s “Die My Love,” where he got trampled by a rampaging Jennifer Lawrence.) And it’s impressive that these two heavily photographed A-listers can still pretend to get awkward in front of a camera, tightly tucking in their smiles.
The editing is so attention-grabbing that it deserves third billing, with Borgli and his co-editor Joshua Raymond Lee vaulting between timelines only to freeze on heart-stopping details. In one pathetic beat, a character’s shirt gets ripped open during an ill-conceived tryst at work and the scene lingers as they bend over to pick up the broken buttons, forcing you to imagine how awful they’ll feel limping on with their day.
Like Mike White before him, Borgli trains his spotlight not on celebrities but civilians, tapping into the mass anxiety that we’ve all done things that we’d rather keep private. Here, people’s transgressions are discovered through happenstance: a sidewalk run-in, a spouse’s blabbing, a night of too much wine and too little food. The randomness feels like a wicked game of chance. Anyone swanning about feeling morally superior just hasn’t yet had their number called. And while he doesn’t make a big case of it, he even takes the unusual stance that peer pressure can be positive.
Charlie so badly bungles their meet-cute that you expect “The Drama” to argue that their relationship is doomed. Instead, it does something wiser: Emma forgives him and moves on. It’s the movie‘s grand statement, delivered in a shrug. If anything, I like Borgli because he’s the exact opposite of filmmakers who insist that everyone is good deep down. He suspects we’re all a little rotten but that we can still do nice things, too, including cutting each other some slack — a blessing that would hit harder if he’d grappled with what Emma nearly did.
The last act is frustrating, with Borgli building toward a comic meltdown he’d rather avoid — he doesn’t want to give us the cathartic relief. It feels wonky and I can’t shake the sense that film would be stronger if we had a chance to fall in love with Emma and Charlie or at least to root one way or another whether we want them to work it out. Ultimately, “The Drama” is the movie equivalent of a half-glass of Champagne: a toast Borgli trusts us to decide whether its ideas are half-empty or half-full. I’ll raise my cup to full, but only because of how pleasurably it bubbles.
‘The Drama’
Rated: R, for language, sexual content and some violence
Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, April 3 in wide release
