Issue #95: Inconvenient Implosion 🧨

Cate would like to extend her congratulations to Michael B. Jordan for his Best Actor win for his work in Sinners. The Oscars may be weeks behind us, but the memory never ceases to make her smile. While we’ve been AWOL for most of the new year so far, we’re delighted to finally be getting back on the horse and discussing these new films.

First up, we have Zosha, with the things that sit with her most about Sentimental Value. Then we’ve got Cate on the knotty moral pleasures of The Drama.

Zosha on Sentimental Value

NEON

Critics have a rep for being opinionated. It’s the whole point of the art form, to some, and people who don’t indulge (or at least write) their critical side often expect everything to be bad or good, big or small. The truth is, most movies fall somewhere in between — some gloriously and fiercely so. I’m here to talk to you about one such movie, its delights, its foibles, its thoughtful, perfectly fineness.

Sentimental Value, the Oscar-nominated film from Joachim Trier (who directed and co-wrote it with Eskil Vogt), has a distinct elegance to it. From the very beginning it calls its shot, allowing a narrator to take us through a brief history of the house. We hear stories; see glimpses like puffs of memory all with a distinct point of view. Such poetic nostalgia is constantly humming in the back of the film, even when Sentimental Value’s story has to take up more practical concerns. The story kicks off when two daughters Nora and Agnes (played by Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) find out their dad still legally owns their mom’s house, even decades after divorce. Now after her death, the estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård) is coming home — at least, for a bit, to film his next film.

Quickly they find themselves at odds with their father’s vision: He wants them involved in production. He wants to remember sunnier days of their adolescence. At every step he expects ease, even as he blurs the lines between personal and professional. So when he hires American actress Rachel (Elle Fanning) to take the lead role only after Nora turns him down, he isn’t really sure what the problem is.

What sits with me about it is the way the movie so delicately weaves its story, the way you work pastry dough through aggressive manipulation and a light touch. It’s hard to tell stories about families coming apart and together — all the weight of day-to-day accumulations often lost in the overwhelming flavor of major frissons — and even more difficult to tell us stories about art, constantly running the risk of an in-universe performance landing with such a thud that the rest of the story gets pulled into a hole with it. That Sentimental Value braids these beats together, making them totally reliant on each other, should strain the movie far more than it does. But the movie lets them pull on each other and sit uncomfortably together, with small nuggets blooming into a broader understanding of where we are and what could be. Art is life and life is art.

It’s imperfect, sure; the movie is mostly between Nora and her father, with Agnes and Rachel sitting somewhere awkwardly between side characters and main participants in the story. But for as off-kilter and sometimes overworked as Sentimental Value can feel at a granular level (there’s an interstitial of faces blurring together that feels particularly overwrought and unnecessary), its comfort in letting the feelings of one person slide into the next person, and the next is enjoyable. That is a lot easier to enjoy when the movie isn’t trying too hard — at times underscoring points that already feel artfully established to make sure you get it — but it’s not hard to enjoy generally.

As the film circles the Borg house, there’s a real sense of history, the layers of phantoms that have walked and cried and been alive there. Sentimental Value can, at times, be so specifically pointed at its conclusion it fails to surprise. But its little pockets intrigue, a reminder that sometimes life is about taking a mixed bag of everything and sorting out what resonates.

Cate on The Drama

A24

This review contains spoilers for The Drama, including its controversial “twist.”

A24’s new film The Drama is a fascinating artefact. Starring Zendaya (Emma) and Robert Pattinson (Charlie) as a young couple on the heels of their wedding, it examines how the dynamics between them change when Emma reveals a dark secret to their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie).

There’s no real way to talk about the film without discussing the information she shares. At a dinner a week before the wedding, Rachel suggests that they reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done: as a teen, Charlie cyberbullied a boy so badly that he and his family moved as a result; Mike used an ex-girlfriend as a human shield on her birthday, when a stray dog attacked them both in an alley; and Rachel locked a mentally disabled boy from her neighborhood in a wooden closet in the woods near their home and left him there overnight. She did not reveal his whereabouts when his parents came looking, even as a search party was formed to locate him.

As for Emma, when she was 15, she planned a school shooting in response to the bullying she had been experiencing from white classmates. She even went so far as to bring her father’s rifle to school. But a separate shooting at a different location on that same day shook her back to her senses, and she did not go through with it. In understanding the impact of the shooting on her community, she spent the time after the incident becoming a teen anti-gun activist in an effort to atone.

It’s undeniably a shocking and upsetting thing to learn about someone you love. Despite the fact that this chapter of her life is now closed, the fact of its existence discombobulates Charlie, leading to a slow motion breakdown that nearly destroys their relationship. Importantly, it leads to a massive rift between Emma and her maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim). Rachel’s cousin Sam is a school shooting survivor, and is now a wheelchair user as a result.

Rachel is a very specific and recognizable kind of white woman, and Haim plays her with near unmitigated glee. A savvily performed mix of Amy Elliot Dunne and Regina George, she casually demeans Emma throughout the film, establishing a relationship that is quite familiar to most Black women, if not to Emma herself. When Emma’s secret is disclosed, Rachel stakes her claim as a moral arbiter. Her reaction is one of the strengths of the film, as it delicately engages with the group’s racial dynamics.

Rachel holds Emma’s secret over her head, completely disregarding her own confessed abuse even when prompted. Never mind that her cruelty was enacted, while Emma’s violence was aborted. The only person Emma ever hurt was herself — her mishandling of her father’s rifle left her deaf in one ear. Rachel and Charlie’s ages are reason enough to dismiss the severity of their actions despite the very real impact on their victims. Neither Charlie nor Rachel ever tried to make amends. But Emma’s age is proof of her hidden deviance, even though effectively, her secret is that she didn’t cause harm.

Rachel even invokes Mike’s blackness as proof that Emma is uniquely violent because he also “grew up around guns,” something he points out isn’t even true. Rachel’s overall response is to make the situation about herself. First she tells Emma she won’t be attending the wedding, then makes a show of having Sam — who she earlier admitted she wasn’t close to — come to her office so that she could ask how she felt about declining the invitation. When Sam raises no objections, Rachel instead intentionally makes a spectacle at the wedding during her maid of honor speech.

Over the course of the film, Haim expertly reinforces that Rachel thinks she’s better than Emma, and she’s happy to remind her of it every chance she gets. Her husband is a prop for her own moral authority, and Emma is a punching bag she can use to elevate her own presumptive goodness. At the dinner, it was Rachel who poked and prodded at Emma until she relented, and it’s in that scene where Haim absolutely sings. The shock on her face is sincere, but so is the derision. Her nose scrunches with disgust even as her eyes transmit incredulity. Even in a true moment of disbelief, Haim makes it clear that Rachel got far more than she bargained for with her little hunting expedition.

The characters all note that most school shooters are white men and boys; Emma’s actions are notable precisely because she is not one of them. Writer director Kristoffer Borgli never seriously engages with how that reality is complicated by the fact that Emma is a mixed-race Black woman, leaving that work to his actors and the audience in turn. And while there are several scenes of teenaged Emma working through her plan, the movie doesn’t seem the least bit interested in her interiority.

In an ironic twist, that narrative emptiness gives Zendaya lots of room to play in her craft, and consequently her work in The Drama is the best of her career. The movie’s jurisdiction never does extend to Emma’s thoughts and feelings, but Zendaya makes them legible anyway in heartbreaking displays of shame, worry, loneliness and quiet humiliation. While the audience follows Charlie’s dramatic spiral into neurosis, Zendaya settles outside that, gently encouraging us to shift focus and contemplate how painful that period of Emma’s life must have been.

But despite the barest revelations about the choices her 15-year-old self made, the audience isn’t given any meaningful insight into her perspective as an adult. The movie happens around her. And none of the characters are particularly concerned with how she feels. Instead Zendaya finds the emotional nooks and crannies of the role that the script does not provide her, and brings Emma’s emotional desperation to the surface.

Emma is terrified that this confession will mean the people in her life no longer love her. And the pained embarrassment she conveys in the film’s later scenes gives Emma a fullness that implies a renewed reckoning with the fact that there’s a reason she’d never disclosed her secret before. Rachel’s insistence that Emma is a psychopath is not irrelevant. The key result is that the film raises questions about whose violence is forgivable, and who deserves a second chance. Who is branded with their wrongdoing forever, and eternally reduced to their worst moment?

Emma explains to Charlie that she was trying on a persona — an artificial skin she could use to work through her resentment. She felt drawn to the well-established aesthetics of school shooter tropes. School shootings are simply what lonely, disaffected American teenagers do, and it was a script she chose to follow. Ironically, one might argue she was merely cycling through a new self in the very way that teenagers are wont to do. In fact, it’s something her father indicates she did quite often at that time. But a lack of meaningful supervision and support sent her down a dark and dangerous path.

What mitigates Emma’s actions as a teen, and should earn her grace as an adult isn't simply that she didn’t go through with her plan, but why. She had a reason for her grievance, even if it reads as frivolous to adults. But if the grievance was deeply held, a concurrent shooting would have at best delayed her, not dissuaded her. Her pain would still be there. Instead, witnessing the impact of that violence firsthand was enough to put things in perspective. Shooting people is real. The harm it causes is real. It’s not just goth-coded fun and games on the internet. Eyeliner and army fatigues do not a school shooter make. This isn’t just another persona to be casually played with. And the death of her classmate showed that that was in fact, the full extent of her skin in the game.

On the other hand, Charlie’s dilemma is central to the plot — how can he square the woman he loves with the new information he’s been given? The truth is he can’t really, and never actually manages to. Burdened by the outrage of his friends, he’s unable to evaluate his own feelings about the situation. Instead, he grasps at hypotheticals and desperately searches for reasons why Emma’s impulse wasn’t that bad, including massively exaggerating trauma from her past. The dissonance he feels janks him in and out of reality. He’s haunted by visions of massacred people at their wedding. How can he trust that Emma’s really changed? Does he even really know her?

The thing is, he does know her, and that’s why he’s so conflicted. He would never have suspected that the woman he loves would have something so dark as part of her story. But that’s also where his answer should have come from. He’d never have suspected it because she isn’t that person anymore. Instead, he reimagines innocuous situations as clandestine proof of past and future violence — screaming at an inconsiderate driver in a crosswalk or holding a knife while she chops fruit for a smoothie.

Emma’s reaction to the unfolding situation is an attempt to draw it back — to communicate and clarify that this is an incidental facet of the person she is now — a teenaged impulse she thankfully corrected. It’s something she deeply regrets and she tells Charlie as much when he asks. But Charlie’s response is to lose control so thoroughly that he kisses a coworker and humiliates them both at their wedding. Emma deals with her mounting anguish alone. Charlie makes his, everyone else’s problem. It’s a privilege Emma isn’t granted.

All in all, The Drama is a pretty slick dark comedy about a very real communal plague our society has designated as the cost of doing business. While not quite as provocative as it thinks it is, I quite liked it, and the more distance I get from it, the more it grows in my esteem. Borgli’s command of the story is precise. He draws Pattinson’s twitchy indecision into a taut psychological thriller, while Zendaya remains in a gorgeous if run-of-the-mill adult drama. Several scenes feature gun illusions so absurd as to be genuinely funny — including a precisely timed backfire that conspicuously interrupts the extolling of Emma’s virtues.

Even Emma’s hair becomes a character of its own: straight or styled when she embodies a persona, but curly and child-like when she feels vulnerable. And in the film’s most romantic scene, Borgli makes Emma’s deafness part of her and Charlie’s love story rather than merely a consequence of her past life. The repeated motif of their initial meet-cute (he flubs the approach and they “try again”) signals the changing shades of their relationship right down to the movie’s last moments — curiosity, then distance, then reconciliation.

Many critics have questioned the necessity of the film’s central provocation. And to an extent they’re right to. But to do so is also to miss the point. Narratively speaking, Emma’s secret could have been anything. Subbing in Rachel’s confession instead would have changed very little about the story’s thematic interests. After all, the framing device of the plot is ludicrously simple. The movie is less about what the bad deed is than the degree of bad. The contrast between Emma’s secret and Rachel’s in particular, is the crux of the story. Who gets to brush off their cruelty? Who gets to wipe the slate clean? After all, no one is following Rachel around insisting she’s a psychopath because she kidnapped a disabled boy and left him to die.

So why, at a table with three Americans, in America, where mass shootings are so frequent as to be background noise, is this particular confession so appalling? Have we not demonstrated over, and over, and over and over again that mass shootings are as American as apple pie? So is this premise a true provocation, or simply the last taboo? I disagree with the assertion that a problem this sensitive should be handled with kid gloves — precisely because if we had, it would cease to be a problem.

And that isn’t to minimize the severity of what Emma planned to do. Had she gone through with it, she would have irrevocably changed the lives of nearly every person in her orbit. But why is a school shooting a scandal when an individual flirts with the idea, but less so when they actually kill people? Why is it that in the abstract, they’re someone else’s problem to solve, but in a concrete reality it’s the worst thing they could ever do? When our culture has made it clear for at least the last 25 years that school shootings are little more than public celebration by a disaffected subculture, is it really that strange that an unmoored teenager might find community where she saw her own pain reflected?

Charlie wasn’t wrong when he pointed out that given the frequency of this wholly American kind of violence, there are hundreds of thousands of people mulling over the same vicious possibility, and we’ll never know about it until or unless they enact their plans. Emma was one of them. And her intense shame around the incident and reform in its aftermath is precisely how we know she’s changed. In that way, Emma’s thin characterization is a feature not a bug; it gives us space to project our motives and biases onto a character we cannot neatly categorize or condemn because she falls so far outside the mean.

So despite the sticky subject matter, I can’t quite work up the nerve to be outraged. When a tragedy this severe happens so often that they’re counted in days, with no end or action in sight, I’m loathe to tell a filmmaker he’s disallowed from engaging with that reality. We’ve collectively reduced the existential terror of children being murdered in their schools to a crawl on the evening news. Borgli is not the one trivializing these events. We are.