As a troubled teen seduced by the online glamorization of gun violence, Emma once fantasized about committing a school shooting. A series of flashbacks (in which Jordyn Curet plays the teenage Emma) reveals that she went so far as to bring her father\u2019s shotgun with her to school before abandoning the plan, sinking the firearm into a lake, and throwing herself into anti-gun-violence activism.<\/p>\n
Is this a destabilizing fact to learn about one\u2019s adorable and adoring fianc\u00e9e only days before vowing to have and to hold her, till death do you part? Most certainly. Does Charlie, or anyone else in the movie, respond to it the way any real human, rather than a handy plot contrivance, would? Not really. Instead of going home from that awful pre-wedding dinner (which concludes on the first of several instances of projectile vomiting), having a clarifying heart-to-heart about Emma\u2019s past, and pledging to go into couples therapy as soon as the ceremony is over\u2014or possibly before it starts\u2014Emma and Charlie decide to power through their last premarital week pretending that everything is fine. Posing for a chipper wedding photographer (Zo\u00eb Winters, who also played a key role in the similarly queasy rom-com Materialists<\/a>), they display such fake smiles and stiff body language that the photographer has to all but physically move them into poses that suggest real intimacy or affection.<\/p>\n \n Zendaya\u2019s Emma remains a manic pixie school shooter\u2014and if that phrase strikes you as glibly offensive, wait till you see the\u00a0movie.\n<\/p>\n Charlie and Emma\u2019s home life, too, curdles. Their formerly steamy sex life fizzles as Charlie finds himself unable to perform, and little things like a coffee mug printed with the flippant slogan \u201cCoffee or I\u2019ll Shoot\u201d provoke savage fights that threaten the impending nuptials. Both of them also start acting out at their jobs, Emma by sabotaging a professional collaboration with Rachel (who remains openly horrified by her friend\u2019s dinner-table confession), and Charlie by making a bizarre confession of his own to a museum colleague (Hailey Benton Gates). By the time their big day rolls around, both the bride and the groom\u2014but especially the groom\u2014are in a state of profound paranoia and self-doubt that augurs ill for both their marriage and their mental health.<\/p>\n Like Borgli\u2019s previous film, the Nic Cage\u2013starring psychological thriller Dream Scenario, The Drama falls victim to a syndrome that\u2019s sadly common to the kind of high-concept feel-bad movies (Eddington<\/a>, If I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You<\/a>) that have become one of A24\u2019s specialties: The script\u2019s excitement about firing off inflammatory big ideas far outstrips its interest in exploring them. There\u2019s something not just undercooked but insulting about how little attention The Drama pays to the inner life of Emma, ostensibly the movie\u2019s co-lead and the character whose adolescent breakdown serves as the plot\u2019s convenient catalyst. What were her motivations for drunkenly revealing that long-hidden time in her past, not to mention her motivations for contemplating a mass shooting in the first place? Those hurried, mostly dialogue-free flashbacks seem to suggest that teen Emma\u2019s deep feeling of alienation had to do with her status as a mixed-race student at a fancy private school in the South. But we get little sense of how the present-day Emma has come to understand that dark period in the years since. Charlie\u2019s mystification at how his warm, loving, levelheaded betrothed could possibly harbor such a secret is a proxy for the audience\u2019s own confusion. Despite an appealing performance from the impossible-to-dislike Zendaya, Emma remains a story-advancing cipher, a manic pixie school shooter\u2014and if that phrase strikes you as glibly offensive, wait till you see the movie.<\/p>\n For the purposes of the falling-domino plotline, culminating in a \u201cHow bad can it get?\u201d wedding sequence, Emma\u2019s past infraction could have taken the form of any number of other mistakes, since the movie\u2019s main intent is not to comment on the gun-violence crisis but to mine the social discomfort of Emma\u2019s revelation for comedy. This does occasion some uneasy laughs, mostly thanks to Pattinson\u2019s self-lacerating performance as the well-intentioned but spineless Charlie. Pattinson has long sought out roles that allow him to heap abjection on his own handsome head, and this part provides ample opportunity to do just that. Even if his character as written makes little more sense than Zendaya\u2019s, Pattinson at least gets lots of solo screen time in which to put poor Charlie through his twitchy, masochistic paces.<\/p>\n
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