Joel on Film

The Drama is all about secrets—shocking and corrosive and mortifying ones, mostly in that order. A pretty big one comes to define, then to divide, the couple at the center of writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s film, because how could it not? Once we learn it, we recognize it for the galvanizing truth it is, prompting the old question about how much we really know the people with whom we share our lives.

The challenge for Borgli, then, is in how to deal with the implications, then the ramifications, of that particular truth when it comes tumbling out of the drunken mouth of the imminent-bride-to-be during a game of daring to tell one’s closest friends about the worst things each of them has ever done. We can sort of see the opening for Emma (Zendaya), who goes last in this game of truth-telling, when a story of accidental imprisonment, leading to at least a 12-hour search by police, opens the drunken gabfest up to potentially taboo subjects. There’s something in her eyes, which come to the intoxicated realization (incorrectly, of course) that she might be in non-judgmental company here.

It’s quite important, by the way, not to say in a review what this secret is, but then again, it also might be important not to specify to whom the story described above (quite loosely) belongs or go into detail about the two others we hear in this scene. In a lot of ways that are kind of intangible, if the film is about secrets, it’s worth keeping them for those who wish to know nothing specific about the scene. All one really needs to know is that each of the stories likely forces the other three to see the teller differently—though, crucially, each of those stories is also worthy of some amount of pity.

Needless to say, Emma’s story lands differently for the other members of this party, which includes her fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson), his best friend and best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Mike’s wife and the maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim). It’s not only the bad timing of the confession, since the wedding is just days away and Charlie’s parents might even now be on a plane from his native London. It’s the way each of the other three reacts to the proclamation: Charlie’s nonplussed amazement, Mike’s general discomfort and, especially, Rachel’s sense of betrayal, as the issue raised therein is deeply personal to her.

These early stretches of Borgli’s screenplay are observantly and credibly performed by all these actors, though, of course, Zendaya’s performance is key. The actress is thoroughly believable in the difficult role of a woman who has put herself in the position of confronting a thorny past—without simplistically earning forgiveness or admonishment. Pattinson is also quite good at the downward spiral his Charlie begins to experience the weight of the truth, its implications, and what they might mean in their marriage going forward—his love, which he once thought unconditional, now complicated by, to put it lightly, a significant item in Emma’s baggage.

The downfall, though, is subtle at first, as it seems that Borgli is in always in a hurry to find a way for the characters, or the movie itself, to avoid dealing with the issue of the terrible truth in any substantive way. There’s the fact that Pattinson’s performance somehow moves through a series of comically overwrought breakdowns, which inspire his own little white lies as a way of trying to keep the big day from fracturing like everything else has. There’s also the way Borgli keeps turning the implications of Emma’s confession into little visual gags, with reminders popping up all over the house or within her very personality, so that Charlie is never left alone with a thought that doesn’t turn toward what might happen next.

It all leads to the wedding itself, at which not only the big truth, but also a bunch of tinier truths with their own webs of consequence, explodes into a shower of tortured melodrama, leading to a pat, wholly unearned ending that relies on cuteness instead of conviction. Yes, the premise and the idea behind The Drama are nasty and confrontational, but the movie that they make is simply an uncomfortable, unchecked combination of tones.

Rating: ** (out of ****)