[COLUMN] The Drama, Materialists and the New Fucked-Up Rom-Com | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Drama and Materialists. These are both movies that contain fairly sizable pivots within them, and which have maximal impact if those beats are not known ahead of time. So, if you are planning to see either - and they are both very good, if a little sharper and more barbed than their marketing makes them seem, with The Drama poking quite aggressively at American taboos - it might be best to bookmark this essay and come back. No drama.

Kristoffer Borgli’s new film, The Drama, has predictably generated some drama.

The film unfolds in the week leading up to the wedding of young couple Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya). At a food and wine tasting with their best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), the four decide to play a game. They go around the table and each confesses the worst thing that they have done. Mike used an ex-girlfriend as a human shield during a dog attack. Charlie cyberbullied a kid. Rachel locked a disabled child in a closet overnight.

However, none of the other three members of the party are prepared for Emma’s confession: she planned a mass high school shooting. She was very committed to the idea. She is deaf in one ear because she was holding the gun wrong while practicing. She recorded her video statement. She identified key targets in her yearbook. She even brought the gun to school. However, at the last minute, after another unrelated mass shooting occurs, Emma decided not to follow through.

This revelation sends everything spiraling. Charlie, who is British, has no real ability to comprehend or grapple with this fact that he has discovered about the woman that he is going to marry. Rachel becomes apoplectic, pointing out that her cousin Sam (Anna Baryshnikov) was paralyzed in a mass shooting. Charlie and Emma stumble through the next few days, as Charlie basically implodes at the realization that he seemingly does not know his wife-to-be at all.

There has predictably been some backlash over the film. Some critics have rushed out to insist that The Drama is "not a rom-com nor a sexual romp”, with reviews opening by warning readers that the film “is not a romantic comedy.” There was some handwringing over the way that the film was sold to audiences by concealing the twist, with a goofy trailer and a “save the date” announcement, prompting some observers to ask, “was the promotion misleading?”

It is worth stating two things up front. The first is that The Drama is absolutely a romance. At its core, it is a film that asks the question of what it means to love a person and to know everything about them, including the worst thing that they have ever done. Charlie spirals out of control over the course of the week, and the wedding is a complete disaster, but the film ends on a sincere and optimistic note, with the two characters reuniting at a diner, meeting again and starting over.

The second thing to state up front is that The Drama is absolutely a comedy. It is playing with taboo subjects, but is consistently and undeniably funny. The morning after Emma’s confession, she and Charlie meet with their wedding photographer Frances (Zoë Winters), who goes through each guest at the wedding and if, how or where she is going to “shoot” them, complete with deadpan cuts to Charlie and Emma’s stunned frozen faces. It is as funny as anything in Project Hail Mary.

It is an edgy sort of humor that occasionally veers into cringe comedy. It is quite European in its sensibilities, a film that is in many ways about a culture clash and the question of cultural taboo. It takes its characters and its concept seriously, but it is not afraid to be goofy. Borgli makes great use of reaction shots, and edits to particular jokes – there is a smash cut from Charlie attacking the much larger Blake (Michael Abbott Jr.) to Charlie arriving back at his apartment bloodied and bruised.

So, The Drama is romantic and it is comedic. It is, by definition, a romantic comedy. That said, it is not a romantic comedy in the way that a lot of audiences understand the classic romantic comedy, as codified during the 1930s by classics like It Happened One Night and then really canonized during the 1990s by films like Sleepless in Seattle or When Harry Met Sally. It operates on a very different wave length from those movies with a very different sensibility. This is okay. Genres are allowed to change and shift over time.

It is worth noting that The Drama is not the only recent film to generate this sort of discourse. Celine Song’s Materialists sold itself to audiences with a very classical romantic comedy premise, teasing a love triangle between financially-obsessed matchmaker Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), her broke ex-boyfriend John Pitts (Chris Evans) and her wealthy suitor Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal). The basic arc of the movie is classic romantic comedy, a status-obsessed woman needs to learn to love.

However, like The Drama, Materialists takes a couple of weird turns. It opens with a flashback to prehistoric times, depicting the first union of cave people. The third act swerves sharply when it is revealed that one of Lucy’s clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters again, the patron saint of this nascent subgenre), was sexually assaulted by another, Mark (John Magaro). It is a somewhat weightier movie than it initially appeared to be.

Once again, there was handwringing. Richard Lawson headlined his review at Vanity Fair stating bluntly that “Materialists is not a rom-com.” “You are being misled by the marketing of Materialists,” opined Boston Globe critic Odie Henderson. Once again, questions were asked about whether the film was the one that “people were expecting.” However, like The Drama, Materialists is a sincere romance and quite a funny movie, just not in the exact style of 1990s romantic comedies.

The release of these two movies so close together has prompted some commentary. While these are most definitely romantic comedies, they are a different breed than films like Pretty Woman or Notting Hill. They are in some ways darker and slightly more introspective takes on the genre, spiritual descendants of harder-edged romantic comedies like My Best Friend’s Wedding, a film that Celine Song was recently hired to sequelize off the back of the success of Materialists.

There have been calls to create a new classification for these films. On the industry podcast The Town, producer Craig Horlbeck suggested christening the emerging subgenre “the fucked up rom-com.” This is certainly apt, with the swearword reflecting the more jagged sensibility of these films compared to earlier, more traditional entries in the genre. However, it might be more apt to describe them as “revisionist romantic comedies”, like the revisionist westerns of the 1960s and 1970s.

After all, this evolution of the romantic comedy mirrors what happened to the western. Like the classic romantic comedy, the classic western was a reliable money-spinner for studios. Many classic westerns, like many classic romantic comedies, were extremely formulaic. They were also extremely popular. Studios produced a lot of them and, for quite a while, they reliably made a lot of money. Pretty Woman was the second highest grossing film of 1990. Sleepless in Seattle was the fourth highest grossing film of 1993. Runaway Bride and Notting Hill were in the top twelve for 1999.

To be clear, many of these films were great. Just as the classic western produced masterpieces like Stagecoach or The Searchers, the traditional rom-com produced delights like When Harry Met Sally or Clueless. The problem was that, just like with the studio programmer westerns, the genre produced a lot of bland programmers – 27 Dresses, P.S. I Love You, The Ugly Truth, Along Came Polly and so on. Audiences stopped turning out reliably and studios pivoted to making different films.

Much has been written about the death of the classic romantic comedy. The formulaic classical iteration of the genre arguably lives on as a largely nostalgic object on streaming services, with films like Set It Up on Netflix, Sweethearts on HBO Max or You’re Cordially Invited on Amazon. There have been occasional theatrical attempts at a revival of the genre, like Crazy Rich Asians or Anyone But You, often prompting discourse, but the genre has never been fully revived in cinemas.

As with westerns, the larger studios’ decision to move away from the genre to pursue a different model of filmmaking opened more dynamic possibilities. Many of the early wave of revisionist westerns were made by Europeans who had grown up on American cinema and wanted to put their own spin on it. It is telling that both The Drama and Materialists are distributed by indie studio A24, which has a somewhat more diverse and esoteric approach to the kinds of films that it releases.

More fundamentally, though, revisionist westerns resonated with audiences who had grown tired and skeptical of the myth of the American frontier. These films spoke to a generation of movie-goers disillusioned by the Vietnam War and disaffected by the chaos of the late 1960s. It was the right time for movies like A Fistful of Dollars or The Wild Bunch, not just in terms of shifts within the industry, but also movements within the larger culture.

The same is true of this wave of revisionist romantic comedies. To put it simply, younger audiences have a very different relationship to romance and to sex than older generations. Gen Z is having less sex. People are getting married later. Online dating is a fundamental game-changer. Even the basic logistics of managing a romantic entanglement feel more complex now than in earlier generations with “situationships” and “open relationships” being far more common.

This all makes sense in a larger cultural context. Sex is an increasingly fraught topic in pop culture, thanks to larger social issues like the gradual expansion and quick retraction of women’s bodily autonomy, the discourse around #metoo, the backlash to #metoo, the rise of the “manosphere” and the “red pill.” Even more abstractly, the idea of dating in the panopticon of social media, where the public and private blur together, fundamentally changes so much of the underlying calculus.

With this in mind, it is notable that both Materialists and The Drama feel like movies that are in some ways about modern dating in the online age. In Materialists, Lucy is effectively a bespoke dating app, matching individuals algorithmically which leads them to see each other as commodities. In the opening moments of The Drama, Charlie admits that he was worried that he was being filmed by Emma during their awkward flirtation.

The Drama feels like it’s about dating somebody in an era where everybody puts everything online. When Emma complains that their rehearsed dance routine seems performative, their instructor (Dee Nelson) explains, “It’s a wedding. It’s performative by nature.” It often seems like the real problem isn’t that Emma confessed her sin to Charlie, but that Mike and Rachel were there too. Charlie often seems less obsessed with what he thinks or knows and more about how other people would react, trying to narrativize it. Rachel makes it all about her.

More broadly, Emma admits that she was drawn to the idea of doing a school shooting by the aesthetics of it online, recording her manifesto into a webcam. The film opens with Charlie rehearsing his wedding speech, crafting the image of Emma that he wants the people around him to see, even asking Mike how he could possibly hint to the assembled guests - including their parents - that the couple enjoy great sex. Everything is designed to be shared. Charlie is haunted by an art book titled Brainrot. Borgli’s previous film, Dream Scenario, was in part a parable for the experience of being a social media “main character.”

In this sense, both The Drama and Materialists are taking the conventional romantic comedy and updating to speak to the experiences and the perspectives of a younger audience with a different relationship to romance. It seems to have worked. Materialists grossed over $100m on a $20m budget. Only a week into release, The Drama has already grossed $26m on a budget of $28m, which would put it comfortably on the path to long-term profitability even just domestically.

It’s really sweet to see such a classic Hollywood genre evolving in real time, to see younger audiences getting a chance to fall in love with their own version of the romantic comedy.