The Drama

Spoilers alert.

Two perfectly nice people are about to get married.

We see how they first got to know each other. He said that he liked the book she was reading in the cafe, but she didn’t hear him, being deaf in one ear. When they went for their first date he admitted he hadn’t even read it.

People talk in partial sentences; a bit wittier than real people would be; but still giving the sense we are watching a fly on the wall documentary rather than a movie. The nice best man is helping the guy write a nice speech. There is a certain amount of un-necessary, er, drama, when bride and groom think they spot the DJ they hired for the wedding snorting heroin on a street corner, but nothing more serious than that. And then the couple and the best man and the maid of honour have dinner with the caterers to finalise the menu and just hang out, and they are having fun until the moment when Emma is transformed in her sleep into a hideous insect.

Sorry. Spoiler alert. What actually happens is that it turns out that Charlie is Emma’s childhood sledge.

Being silly now. The problem is that Charlie has been dead all along and Emma has the power to see dead people.

Sod it. The conversation turns to the subject of “the worst thing each of us ever done.” Mike (Mamoudou Athie) the best man admits to having once used his girlfriend as a human shield while they were being menaced by a barky dog. His girlfriend Rachel (Alana Haim) admits to having locked a neighbour’s mentally retarded son in a closet they found in the woods. Charlie (Robert Pattinson ) can think of nothing worse than some cyberbullying. And then Emma (Zendaya) admits that as a school girl she took her father’s military rifle to school with the intention of carrying out a shooting. She didn’t do it, or anything: but she thought about it and planned it.

Which rather spoils the atmosphere of the evening.

It’s pretty hard to tie the film down to a particular genre. I can see why the real life families of victims of real life school shooters were upset by it. I don’t say gun massacres are not the sort of thing you ought to make movies about; I think that you can make movies about anything. But possibly gun massacres oughtn’t to be used as plot devices in what is quite possibly a romantic comedy. In so far as it is anything.

The complaint that the film humanises shooters is, I think, understandable but wrong headed. Newsflash: they are in fact human.

The narrative develops very plausibly from the initial crisis. Rachel is horrified and disturbed: it turns out that her cousin was crippled in a shooting incident. Charlie tries very hard to carry on with the wedding preparations as if nothing had been said, but it preys, absurdly, darkly on his mind. There is black comedy, as when the wedding photographer keeps saying “I will shoot the bride's family, and then I will shoot the groom's family”. There are embarrassing moments, as when Charlie removes the mug with the “shot of coffee” logo from his cupboard. We gradually hear what actually happened from Emma’s point of view; but it is not entirely clear if the flashbacks — of her researching guns on the internet and making suicide videos — are what happened; or what Emma says happened; or what Charlie imagines must have happened.

The story stays tightly focussed on Charlie and Emma, with other characters coming into view when they intersect with the central "drama"; although all the minor characters — the last minute stand in DJ, Emma’s father, even a tiny vignette of the florist — are concisely pencilled in.

I suppose the story raises a valid philosophical question. Is a person who once thought of doing a terrible thing the same person she would have been if she hadn’t? Are you the sum of the things you thought of doing as well as the things you actually did? Are murderers a special category of person; has Emma revealed herself to be irreducibly psychopathic? Should Charlie, in fact, simply call the police? But the film really presents itself much more as an escalating comedy of embarrassment, where each bad choice creates a new level of complication which all eventually come together in a perfect storm at the wedding. It’s almost like an episode of Frasier without the jokes.

The climax might be said to be a black farce with a marginally hopeful or uplifting, albeit very inconclusive, pay off. It is greatly to the movie's credit that whenever there is an opportunity to tie up the ends in a neat and satisfying way, it does not take it.

Here is my terrible confession, then. 

I keep going and seeing the kind of films that you would not expect me to like — Pillion and Bridget Jones and Marty Supreme — and coming out reassured that they do, in fact, still make them like they used to and we have not after all, moved into a Post-Narrative-Age in which Jacob Elordi staggers across moors and ice flows without any clear purpose or structure. I am not, after all, a Lewisian caveman failing to intersect with post-collapse literature. But I keep coming out of the sorts of movies you would expect me to like, ones about men in tights with magic shields and glowy swords — and feeling quite grumpy about them.

You don’t think that there is any danger that I am finally growing up, do you?

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