Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s wedding day is sure to shock audiences all over
Warning: this review contains spoilers and talks of gun violence
I nestled myself into my movie theater’s all-too-familiar leather seat last Saturday, readying myself to digest a thought-provoking, conversational drama — accurately named The Drama — starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. I am all too familiar with both of these leads and know that the roles they choose often have nuance and something to say, so my expectations were high.
Instead, what I experienced were the people surrounding me genuinely laughing at rhetoric on gun violence in America. I, on the other hand, observed both the crowd and the film in silence and shock.
The film hides this very well in its marketing and trailers, so in case anyone needs it spoiled for their own personal reasons or just wants to know what’s so controversial about two people getting married before committing $20 to a single ticket: The Drama is a romantic dramedy in which a couple, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson), are getting married. The week before the wedding while playing a drunk game with married friends of theirs, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Emma reveals that the worst thing she’s ever done was plan a mass shooting at her high school. She even brought her father’s rifle inside the building. She ended up not going through with it, but the revelation that she had planned it at all raises the question for the rest of the film — the fallout of her confession — of whether she and Charlie can find a way past it. Both as a couple and as people existing in America, a country with a notorious gun problem. Charlie grapples with Emma seeming like a different person to him and Emma struggles with convincing Charlie she’s changed and isn’t the same 15-year-old would-be murderer she once was.
“It reveals a lot about love, about what we’re willing to do for love, what we’re willing to accept and how much you really know your partner,” Zendaya said in an interview promoting the film. This is true, this is a critique of modern romance and showing our flaws and pleading for our life partners to love us as we evolve with our flaws — but did this topic need to be the flaw Emma pleads Charlie to love her in spite of?
What started out as a commentary on unconditional love made me feel like there was an entirely different message by the credits. In the film, childhood sequences are interspersed with Emma and Charlie’s present-day relationship dynamic as she details that the reason she wanted to shoot her classmates was because she had moved schools, was being bullied and had a hard time making friends, which made her depressed. She says the idea wasn’t original and that she’d seen a bunch of content of mass shootings online, but also says she just liked the “aesthetic” of it all. The reason she never ended up committing the shooting was because, the same day, there had been another shooting at her town’s mall and a classmate died in the hospital. This news and witnessing the effect it has on her fellow students shakes young Emma (Jordyn Curet), and she becomes a stark anti-gun violence activist. By the time her past life and motives are fully revealed, it viewed more to me like the message was that you can do all the bad stuff you want, as long as you feel bad about it later.
I felt the subject matter in The Drama was handled in poor taste, overall. I understood Marvel wanting to hide the fact that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were slated to appear in Spider-Man: No Way Home, for example, but hiding this intense and triggering of a “twist” (that’s actually the central plot) proves that writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, much like Emerald Fennell with this year’s also-controversial adaptation of Wuthering Heights, has no care for how the chosen sensitive subject affects other people, as long as it brings in revenue.
“Gun violence, particularly in schools, is not just another dramatic device. Art has the capacity to deepen public understanding and create emotional clarity and awareness, but it can also flatten and distort reality,” Jackie Corin, survivor of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting and co-founder of March for Our Lives, said. “With something like a near-school shooting, even small tonal choices can shift whether a story feels productive or dismissive.” Borgli attempts to dive into and examine the mind of someone who could think of doing such a horrific act, but he never scratches below the surface and plays certain scenes off as comedic or ironic in a funny way that makes it dismissive and not productive.
Borgli wants to have something to say, but he clashes with his own characters over it. This is an interesting (to say the least) time to make a movie with such shock factor, but then not knowing what to say when this topic is affecting people every single day made me plain mad. I want complicated female characters on screen, but you can’t present someone like Emma and then tell me the only reason she wanted to murder her peers was because she simply liked the aesthetics of guns: “The film doesn’t dwell on [Emma’s] reasoning since, like an internet troll, it’s more interested in reaction than any meaningful truths,” Angelica Jade Bastién writes in her review. It deals with its dynamics by ignoring them altogether and pursuing the high of the shock from Emma’s reveal.
And if these things aren’t ignored, they’re being played off for laughs. Once Charlie becomes aware that Emma’s story isn’t a bad joke or drunk slurring, he begins to see her differently — as any partner would upon finding out the love of their life has been lying to them for their entire relationship. He begins to reexamine the life they have lived together, but at certain points, his visions are interrupted with himself and the 15-year-old version of Emma. Instead of walking by the lake and laughing with the Emma he thought he knew, suddenly, he’s caressing the face of 15-year-old her. Instead of taking consultation wedding photographs in a studio with present-day Emma, he finds himself standing there with the 15-year-old version of her he now sees her as, and she’s holding a gun.
This montage and other general gun imagery had my theater in stitches laughing. I felt like I was the only silent one. Maybe it was intended to garner a laugh and cut the tension after the awkward silence upon Emma’s confession, but I don’t think anyone would react that way if it happened to them. It looks silly on the surface to have Pattinson walking down the street, holding hands and laughing with Curet, but the context sucks the humor out of it for me. If my image of my partner was shattered so suddenly like this and I couldn’t see them any other way, living it wouldn’t be so funny. It’s hard to suspend my disbelief when, at the time, the most recent mass shooting was on April 3 of this year, the day before I saw this film. There have been several more since.
The silver lining of this film, however, was the chemistry between Zendaya and Pattinson. I could think of no better actors to play such socially awkward, embarrassing characters individually, and it was even better when they were playing off of each other. Charlie made for an interesting character study on the side as well, as he is ultimately the person most affected by Emma’s lies. While I don’t particularly love moral high-grounding (the annoying type Rachel does during the entire film so she can avoid taking accountability for her own actions — but that’s another analysis in itself), it was almost a guilty pleasure to see Charlie engage in painfully gauche conversations and deeds to prove to himself that he can be as bad as Emma can. To prove that he’s not irrational for still loving her. But, it’s never fully explored what compels him to stay. What it is about their everyday lives we didn’t get to see that makes it so impossible for him to walk away. It’s explored a bit in short bursts of Charlie developing his vows with Mike near the beginning, but again, never goes past the surface with things like her laugh and their sex life. The ending and aftermath of their wedding shows their quirks in the best way, though, despite not having much fully developed material to work with.
Since the film’s release, there have been heated debates all over the internet of whose confession is exactly “the worst” out of the group, often comparing the notion that everyone else (namely Rachel) physically committed an act of harm to the fact that Emma only thought about doing something bad, but didn’t. That, along with the misplaced humor, proves to me that Borgli missed the chance to have a meaningful dialogue about an issue plaguing this country. In reality, none of these confessions can exactly be compared on an equal playing field or quantify harm in the same way (if at all), but one of these things is a much bigger and clearer problem that needs more urgent addressing. Yet, “I was expecting worse” is all people are taking away from it. I can’t help but wonder if the discourse and attitude around the film would be different if Pattinson, a white man, were playing Zendaya’s character instead, or if someone not conventionally attractive were to replace her. It’s actually sad that people were expecting Emma to say something they deem “worse.” This isn’t even a shocking event anymore — it’s predictable. It’s the norm. That’s a scary thought to process where our society is at with this conversation. It’s also a scary thought to process that Borgli feels like he can make a movie exploring morals when he admitted to dating a teenager while in his late twenties — this film’s entire discourse just leaves a sour taste in my mouth from both those behind the message and the public reacting to it.
It’s hard to engage with and properly react to The Drama. I feel as awkward as Charlie trying to form coherent thoughts on it because they keep intersecting with each other. I don’t say these things because it made me uncomfortable; I think films that can make you sit with that emotion are actually quite compelling and are becoming a rarer thing to see. I say these things because it didn’t make some people uncomfortable when it should have. Above everything, though — the offensive use of the subject matter, the fabulous chemistry, the tone-deaf audience I was surrounded by, the overly apparent gun imagery everywhere, the insights into certain characters’ heads and the confusion of why Borgli wanted to make a film like this in the first place if it wasn’t going to plunge into the deepest crevices of Emma and Charlie’s minds — The Drama is interesting and will spark conversation no matter which side you fall on. I went in ready to hate and drag it to the seventh circle of Hell, but walked out thinking it was just okay and being semi-open to revisiting it in the future.
My rating: 3 / 5 stars
Header Image by Sarah Janito. Fourteen Cents Banner by Alex Carrasquillo
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