Ryan Murphy (2020)
When their musical biopic of Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor!) closes after a single performance, on-the-skids stars Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (James Corden) drown their sorrows in the company of perennial chorus girl Angie Dickinson (Nicole Kidman) and – behind the bar – Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), a Juilliard graduate turned resting actor. Dee Dee and Barry decide they need a cause to reboot their careers and create the entirely misleading impression that they’re interested in someone other than themselves. Angie learns on Twitter about Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman), a lesbian teenager in Edgewater, Indiana whose school prom has been cancelled because she wanted to attend with another girl as her partner. The New York theatre foursome sets off for Edgewater to adopt Emma as their cause and win Hoosier hearts and minds.
The Prom started life as a stage musical, with music by Matthews Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin and book by Beguelin and Bob Martin. Originally staged in Atlanta for a few weeks in 2016, it opened on Broadway two years later. Although it got plenty of critical praise and Tony (etc) nominations, the show didn’t show a profit. The Prom‘s commercial future looked rosier from the moment that Ryan Murphy, the hugely successful and influential TV showrunner, announced, in April 2019, that he wanted to turn it into a film. Murphy lost no time making things happen. Within a matter of weeks, he’d signed up Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden and others. The Prom, with a screenplay by Beguelin and Martin, started shooting before the end of the year.
The result has a few things in common with Mamma Mia! They’re musicals in which Meryl Streep stars and epitomises the whole cast’s zestful enjoyment of what they’re doing, daft and camp as it mostly is. Both films are disorienting, though for different reasons. Whenever a lot of people sang and danced together in Mamma Mia!, the number plunged into organised chaos. Phyllida Lloyd, a much-respected theatre director, was a film-making novice, and how it showed. Like her, Ryan Murphy is better known for work in a different medium but has directed two feature films before this one (the poorly-received 2006 adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s startling, funny memoir Running with Scissors and, four years later, Eat Pray Love, which made plenty of money despite mediocre reviews). Murphy’s direction isn’t all over the place as Lloyd’s was. His film’s silliness is far more knowing. Even so, The Prom is bewildering – it’s hard to keep up with the rapid shifts in tone.
The opening satire of self-obsessed luvvies is so broad that the first few minutes are like a comedy sketch (an expensively produced one). You know this can’t be sustained for the length of a feature film, and it isn’t. The situations and characters in Edgewater are broadly drawn, too, but the film isn’t making fun of Emma’s plight or of the anxieties of Alyssa Greene (Ariana DeBose), her closeted inamorata, whose mother (Kerry Washington) is the robustly narrow-minded chair of Edgewater High School’s PTA. Emma and Alyssa need help. Once they and the visitors to Indiana meet, the latter must therefore be a force for good, in spite of their ignobly egocentric motives for descending on the place. After all, Dee Dee, Barry et al aren’t faking their belief in gay rights, which sets them apart from any of the locals in evidence, except Tom Hawkins (Keegan-Michael Key), the high school’s liberal-minded principal. With the battle lines drawn, the narrative veers rapidly back and forth between making fun of the main characters and making sure that they carry the day.
The Prom, improbably, manages to keep this going for over two hours without getting dull – even though a big difference between it and Mamma Mia! is that the songs here, though very numerous, are no great shakes. The entertainment quotient is thanks mostly to Matthew Libatique’s vivid cinematography and the high-powered cast. There are no real weaknesses in it although, if The Prom hadn’t already existed, you might suspect the thin role of Angie Dickinson (why does she share her name with a real star of yesteryear?) was invented to give Nicole Kidman something, but not enough, to do. Meryl Streep, who looks lovely, and James Corden overplay with almost indecent verve. They complement each other well until the gulf between them in acting range emerges as Murphy turns to the melancholy backstories of Dee Dee and Barry – her unhappy marriage, his tragically isolated formative years (Sam Pillow plays him as a teenager). Barry is revealed to be a narcissist faute de mieux – because the homophobic culture he grew up in denied him self-respect as a gay man. In these supposedly touching moments, James Corden is phony as he never is doing the OTT thespian. (It probably doesn’t help that Tracey Ullman, who briefly appears as the mother who rejected Barry and must now make belated amends, gives the impression of having walked into the film straight from her quick-fire impressions TV show.) For Meryl Streep, in contrast, the temporary switches into but-seriously mode are effortless. Neither side of Dee Dee is any kind of stretch for Streep, though she gets a good physical workout in the role.
Jo Ellen Perlman is very likeable as Emma but the most striking character in Edgewater – in the whole film, in fact – is Principal Hawkins. That’s partly because Keegan-Michael Key is relatively, and appealingly, low-key; partly because of what the concoction he’s playing says about The Prom’s mechanics. Dee Dee immediately likes the look of Tom Hawkins; he immediately tells her he’s a super-fan – of musical theatre and her especially (he’s made repeated trips to New York to see her Broadway shows). Although she’s pleased with the adoration, Dee Dee is also disappointed: she assumes the good-looking, unmarried Tom, since he knows all her big show numbers backwards, must be gay. As the role is written, he might just as well be – except that he’s not (by the end of the film, he and Dee Dee are an item). Don’t ask either how this modern, enlightened man came to be appointed high-school principal in a town like Edgewater.
Because its name signals Backwater, I assumed Edgewater was a made-up place but a quick look online tells me it really exists. You’re bound to wonder what its residents think of The Prom‘s characterisation of their culture, especially since Emma’s story is inspired by an actual controversy ten years ago at a Mississippi high school. (Ryan Murphy was born and raised in Indianapolis but that doesn’t explain the choice of setting: it’s the same in the original stage show, whose authors aren’t from Indiana.) It’s remarkable, however, that the film keeps the locals who appear on screen to a minimum. Alyssa’s mother and four dreary straight teenagers, who verbally abuse Emma and blame her for the prom’s cancellation, all see the light in due course. Benighted Hoosiers are otherwise conspicuous by their absence from the film – most conspicuously at the climactic rearranged prom, which appears to draw LGBTQ+ youngsters from across the country.
Peter Bradshaw concludes his enthusiastic review in the Guardian as follows:
‘Of course there is no question of the music-theatre megastars seriously conceding anything to conservative-minded locals, other than the time-honoured virtue of putting aside your self-love for a bit. But self-love is the whole point.’
True enough and Ryan Murphy does illustrate different kinds of self-love, ranging from Emma and Alyssa’s proper self-esteem to Dee Dee and Barry’s extravagant ego-tripping, which is improper but supposedly irresistible. There’s a smug hypocrisy behind this apparent generosity, though: Murphy, Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin are predictably selective about the contexts in which self-approval is a virtue and/or a hoot. It’s OK when it reflects the ethos of liberal-minded Broadway, not OK in small-town Indiana – except where it opposes the status quo. Muffling its own prejudices, The Prom is as blinkered as it’s right on. This can’t have been the film’s intention but it ended up reminding me there’s no one more self-loving than Donald Trump.
17 December 2020
