The Prom

The new musical The Prom is kind of like the Pete Buttigieg of musicals, which is too harsh to Buttigieg, whom I generally like (and preferred over the eventual nominee), but I get why a lot of people don't care for him. I'm not the first one who has thought of similarities between Buttigeg and The Prom; Zachary Stewart wrote about the resemblance of the two last year, but Stewart and I seem to have come to different conclusions. At first I thought Stewart's article was meant to be an insult—both Buttigieg and The Prom are hardworking yet bland and try to be really appreciated. Ultimately, however, they're gay stories presented mainly for straight, centrist audiences.

In fact, centrism is one of the major flaws of this film. The Prom, directed by Ryan Murphy and written for the screen by Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin (who wrote the show with Matthew Sklar), is a movie that likes to think of itself as being self-aware—it is, after all, a show that pokes fun at celebrities embracing activism to help a lesbian student in order to improve their image and brand—and yet it's not as self-aware as it would like to be. Its satire falls flat, and its message of love and acceptance comes across as smug, superior, and outdated. The clearest example of this is undoubtedly the big solo by Trent, the actor in between gigs whose over-beaten joke is that he went to Julliard. In the song, Trent (pretty creepily) stalks a bunch of the conservative teenagers at the mall to sing a song called "Love Thy Neighbor", where he points out all the hypocrisy and absurdity of religious people cherrypicking Bible verses to boost their political agenda. In the long history of arguing over this issue, pointing out the parts in the Bible that would send most of us to Hell has never worked to convince anyone to support queer people. The song, with on-the-nose lyrics including lines like "love trumps all," comes across as if Aaron Sorkin in the late 90s had written it.

The character at the center of this story is Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), a gay teenager in Edgewater, Indiana, who, like most teenagers, wants to go to her high school's prom. However, the PTA, led by Mrs. Green (Kerry Washington), eventually cancels the prom to prevent Emma and her girlfriend (who happens to be the closeted Alyssa Greene, Mrs. Greene's daughter, and is played by Ariana DeBose) from attending. Emma, though, has powerful allies in her corner, one of whom is the principal (Keegan-Michael Key, whose singing is quite good), and the other four (with more questionable motives) are washed-up Broadway actors.

Two of these stars are Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (James Corden), who have just closed a show on Broadway in which they played Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. The biting reviews of their performances finish them. Lacking the will to crawl out of such disappointment, Dee and Barry, while washing away their sorrows in alcohol with chorus girl Angie Dickson (Nicole Kidman) and Trent Oliver (the actor in between gigs played by Andrew Rannells), they stumble upon the anti-lesbian controversy in Indiana on Twitter. Now they have a publicity stunt to save them! So the four of them decide to make their way west to Indiana to demand that this small, backward town change its ways, whether Emma wants their help or not. This cynical, haughty, misguided, fake-woke behavior of the foursome is a major driving point of the story, and in better hands, it could have gone somewhere. Instead, we get unbelievable character arches, boring songs, and fanciful embroidery pretending to be critical art. 

Like Love, Simon two years before it, the place and time of this story is peculiar. GenZ is the most progressive generation alive, and yet this movie would have us believe that the entire student body is united in intolerance toward Emma. Don't get me wrong: It's no question that young queer people still face terrible challenges (like homelessness, for example, in which LGBTQ youth are 120% more likely than non-LGBTQ youth to suffer from; Emma is one of them after she is disowned by her parents), and not being allowed to attend prom with their dates is certainly one such challenge. There is a long history of students fighting for this right, dating back to 1980 in a court case called Fricke v. Lynch in which the court ruled that school bans on same-sex couples attending prom is a violation of students' freedom of speech. Nine years before The Prom debuted on Broadway, a school in Mississippi cancelled its prom instead of allowing a lesbian couple to attend. In a situation similar to what happens in The Prom, a secret dance was planned by the parents instead, and the two gay students were not invited. A similar controversy happened last year in the exact same school district. 

So, why not have the film take place either several decades ago or in present-day Mississippi? It seems like a trivial thing to criticize the movie for, but it's also something I kept thinking about. Putting this story in a modern-day, middle-class Indiana suburb makes what happens in The Prom feel hyperbolic. Believe it or not, Mississippi isn't Indiana (support for same-sex marriage in Indiana was sixteen points higher than in Mississippi, according to polling conducted three years ago). There are so many troubling stories of queer students being discriminated against at schools and proms across the entire country in cases that could have served as the civil rights issue for the film, but an entire school board and student body working to unleash, with surgical precision, gratuitous amounts of humiliation on a school's apparently only out lesbian student in present-day Indiana was not believable to me. 

Even if the above points didn't bother me, there's not a whole lot to praise in The Prom, with its acting in particular being a disappointment. It wouldn't be fair to say that Pellman, who makes her debut here, provides a one-dimensional performance in her role as the kind, persevering Emma, but for a character who is meant to be going through a variety of different emotions and turmoils, Pellman puts forward more or the less the same expression and note in every scene she's in. It could be that this was done deliberately to be Emma's mask in the face of such hatred, but I didn't get that impression. 

Much of the other discussion about the acting has centered on Corden's performance, with articles in IndieWire, Yahoo News, and Buzzfeed all devoting ink to what many viewers will likely take away from his acting: a straight actor leaning heavily into stereotypes, resulting in an unseemly display of gay-face. I agree with these critiques, and I wish that Corden had known better. (I do think he can sing, though.) The controversy aside, his chemistry with Streep mostly works, and she's essentially as good as she's ever been, but she's never really given a bad performance, has she? I just wish she had found a better movie to be in this winter than a feel-good yet phony musical in which the songs all sound the same.

The Prom is the type of movie that feels two decades too late. I had low expectations for The Prom, and they were met.