The Drama
Synopsis: A wedding is about to be derailed after one of the betrothed reveals a secret
There’s good stress and bad stress. Someone headed to jail? Bad stress. Getting married? Good stress. Emma and Charlie are having good stress. It’s a week until their wedding and they’re tying up loose ends like perfecting their first dance and confirming orders with vendors.
The couple live in Boston and have a really nice apartment in Cambridge. He’s an art curator at a museum and she has an office job, but it’s not in finance or tech so idk how they afford it. No matter; the apartment looks good and so do they.
Zendaya is Emma, and Robert Pattinson is Charlie. They met at a Starbucks. On that day he spotted this attractive woman right away. She was sitting by herself, reading a book. He’s flustered and walks through the place with a look on his face like he’s barely holding it together because he’s trying to resist the urge to kill… again. In movies, Englishmen are either James Bond or bumbling stammerers. (By contrast, English women are usually tart and well-spoken.) He awkwardly approaches her and asks about her book. He manages to ask her out and they have a great first date.
They’re both smitten early on. In fact, out at lunch with two friends, Emma is all bubbly talking about him. Her friend Rachel (Alana Haim of the pop group Haim) interrogates Emma with a snide smile on her face. And she’s the maid of honor! Emma, if you didn’t learn this in high school, this girl is a frenemy. Run!
Returning to present-day, Emma and Charlie meet up with Rachel and her husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie) at the caterers. The four are set up in a private room for a wine & dine. The affianced couple are making their final decisions on the menu. Uh, nope. Caterers have menus set months in advance. Even Taco Bell weddings need more than a week’s notice for large receptions.
Everybody is getting their drink on when Rachel wants to play a game where she’ll ask a question and everyone has to answer. Instead of predictable stuff like, Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever had sex, the Haim sister asks: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Because this is the movies, I knew it wouldn’t be anything as simple as lying during a job interview or sleeping with your friend’s ex.
Rachel outs her husband’s secret, then she fesses up before RPatz reveals he falsely told the Twilight filmmakers that he had a hernia which would prevent him from doing ab crunches for his shirtless scene. (Resulting in a makeup artist having to draw-on abs.) Kidding! His character Charlie has some not-so-awful tale.
Then! Zendaya confesses that, at an audition, she once spiked Sabrina Carpenter’s boba tea with salvia. Kidding! Zendaya as Emma casually drops a bomb. (Go to the * at end of review if you want to know what she did. I knew the spoiler before seeing the movie & it didn’t ruin it for me.) The deed is really disturbing but stops short of violence. Rachel starts yelling at Emma like a Haim sister might if her two sisters were invited to Taylor Swift’s wedding and she was not.
It’s super awkward. Charlie is shocked but tries to minimize Emma’s “worst thing.” Mike tries to calm Rachel. And I bet the caterers are mad because somebody threw up and there’s no word on the final decisions for the reception menu.
Over the next few days Charie keeps telling Emma that things are okay, but wtf were you thinking?! The more they talk, the more upset they become –more vomiting ensues. But things are not okay. He can’t get an erection with her anymore. And he’s becoming afraid of his fiancée. When he sees her cutting up fruit to make a smoothie, he nearly jumps out the window. Actually, I did wonder why she was using like, a hatchet to cut up a banana.
Just a couple of days til they exchange vows. They have to go to work and act normal. They have to talk to the florist and the deejay and the photographer. When Charlie and Emma’s photographer snaps a few prelim pix of them, the smiles are frozen on their faces and the big, tall groom edges away from her embrace. The mystified photographer says, Remember! You’re happy! Happy!
While all of this is going on, I thought about how they really should’ve hired a wedding planner. They’d be able to meet with the vendors, short-circuit confrontations and perhaps facilitate difficult conversations.
I felt like the two should postpone the wedding, but I really wanted to see the bride’s gown and how people behaved at the reception. The wedding day arrives… all I can say is that I saw no way for the bad stress to morph into good stress. But then I calmed my nerves and remembered that this is just a movie and in real life Zendaya is probably happy with husband Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson is probably happy with his baby mama, Suki Waterhouse. Unless the four actors got together and played a round of What’s the Worst Thing You Ever Did?
READ the SPOILER or SKIP down to the REVIEW SHORTCUT
*Emma confesses that she planned a high school shooting, but didn’t go through with it at the last minute. As a fifteen-year-old at a new school, she was bullied. She became depressed and started looking up school shootings online. She practiced shooting her dad’s rifle in the woods. She injured herself and dropped the plan. She gradually became friendly with some other students and became a gun control advocate. At one point, Englishman Charlie remarks that America’s gun culture probably influenced her. I feel like her actually being remorseless about assaulting some random person -say, participating in beating up some homeless person would be absolute reason to back out of the wedding would make sense. But there is a huge difference between someone in adolescence – a developmentally fraught time – fantasizing about getting back at bullies and someone actually doing it or considering a mass shooting as an adult.
The writer-director, Kristoffer Borgli, is Norwegian. In 2011, 69 people were murdered in Norway by an assailant using semi-automatic weapons at an island camp (sponsored by the Norwegian Labour party) for teens. Following the incident, Norway outlawed automatic, semiautomatic and high-caliber pistols and rifles. (With exceptions for use for hunting and sport, with safety coursework for owners and registration of firearms.) Since then, there was an attack using a black market machine gun at a Pride Event in which 2 people were murdered. (In three separate domestic violence incidents, a rifle or shot gun was used to murder family members, totaling 9 people, with the 3 perpetrators dying by suicide.)
In 2012, an assailant murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, USA. Twenty of the victims were children aged 6 & 7 years old. The murderer used a semi-automatic weapon. Assault weapons (rapid fire, military rifles) are banned in Connecticut, New York, California, Washington, Hawaii and several other states. However, there has been no federal legislation restricting assault weapons. There have been 2,409 mass shootings in the US since Sandy Hook. (Mass shootings are defined as 3 or more killings in a public place.)
Whether gun laws are strict or lax depends on the state. In the USA there is borderless interstate travel, so people and their guns move freely regardless of state laws.
For more info on the toll of mass shootings click here