'The Drama' can't find its footing

 

  An intriguing movie gets lost somewhere in The Drama, the story of a pending marriage that's shaken when one of the partners reveals something horrible about her past.

  I won't spoil the big reveal, but I will say that Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli might have done well to pick a less explosive issue for a story that begins with a coffeeshop cute-meet between the partners in this prospective couple.

   Museum curator Robert Pattinson falls quickly for literary editor Emma (Zendaya). They seem headed for the proverbial happily-ever-after, but Borgli's jittery direction suggests otherwise. 

  The story kicks into gear when Emma and Charlie meet with a couple who have become friends (Alana Haim and Momoudou Athie). After some drinking, Haim's character suggests they play a game in which each of them reveals the worst thing they've ever done. Emma's revelation shocks everyone and turns Haim's character judgmental. None of them are able to look at Emma in quite the same way again.

  At its best, The Drama toys with the way information can change and distort perception, creating a near-paranoid vision for Pattinson's Charlie, who turns out to be the least stable character in the movie. 

  Flashbacks to Emma's high school years feature Jordyn Curet as a teenager who was bullied, pointing to possible reasons for Emma's extreme youthful behavior, but these scenes aren't developed well enough to dig deeply. 

   Zendaya is caught between Borgli's comic aspirations and the story 's seriousness, and Pattinson delivers a stammering, halting performance that looks as disheveled as his haircut. Charlie's an annoying wreck, and we begin to wonder why Emma, the supposed shaky one, doesn't just dump him.

   Not surprisingly, the whole business moves toward a big wedding scene that features a major helping of excruciatingly presented comic conflict. By then, I'd given up on Borgli's ability to handle the movie's abundant tonal shifts. Throughout, Borgli leaps around in time, cutting into scenes to offer bits of flashback and fantasy and striking discordant notes with a musical score that, at times, suggests horror. 

     The Drama doesn't lack ambition. It uses an extreme example to pose interesting questions about relationships, but winds up being a dispiriting collection of hits, misses, and questionable choices.

An offbeat look at celebrity culture

   Dream Scenario, an inviting display of imagination from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, latches onto a rich idea and has fun playing with it.

   Nicolas Cage portrays Paul Matthews, a tenured biology professor at a small college. Paul bores his students and deludes himself about the book he hopes will lift him from academic obscurity -- if only he could write it. Bald and bearded, Paul has been relegated to life's sidelines.

  And there he remains until he learns that he’s cropping up in the dreams of strangers. Not one or two people, but a legion of folks for whom he’s become a new kind of creature — a dream celebrity.

   Borgli also introduces us to Paul’s wife (Julianne Nicholson) and daughters (Lily Bird and Jessica Clement). Paul's sudden notoriety will plague all of them.

    Not surprisingly, Paul's celebrity attracts an ad agency that wants to set him up with an endorsement program.  Paul’s life as an academic who studies the adaptive power of evolution? Who cares?

    Michael Cera has a nice turn as the head of the agency, a new-breed kind of exec who would be unrecognizable to the suits who ruled during Madison Avenue’s heyday. 

   Cage deftly handles Paul’s foundering as he suddenly becomes a known commodity or, more precisely, a commodity many imagine they know. Ironically, Paul has done nothing to achieve fame other than play recurrent roles in people’s dreams.

    At first, Paul appears in dreams as a passive, ineffectual observer. Eventually, he starts playing murderous roles in horrible nightmares. Borgli skillfully visualizes all of this — although the film's modest quality helps keep effects from dominating.

   As the story progresses, Borgli broadens its scope, taking glancing blows at academia, cancel culture, viral online exposure, student over-sensitivity, and misplaced judgments, people refusing to take responsibility for their dreams. 

    The idea of how a mass phenomenon involving dreams develops remains a mystery Borgli has little interest in solving. Why bother? There's no need for an explanation.

    Fair to say that Borgli doesn’t quite know how to end a film in which cleverness sustains a steady level of amusement rather than becoming a self-conscious expression of trendy social criticisms.

    Borgli gets more out of his premise than you might expect; he turns a film about dreams into a nicely wrought commentary on current realities.