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The show is arguably the most inappropriate, disgusting, and silliest number this reviewer has ever seen.
Musical actress Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) has to endure this sentence in Ryan Murphy's new Netflix adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name from 2018 after a premiere.
The critics consider their appearance too narcissistic, Dee Dee's show will be canceled immediately after the premiere.
Stunned, four aged Broadway stars who mourn the glamor of bygone times get drunk in the melancholy light of the theater bar.
There must be a way to love yourself and still look like a decent person, says Dee Dee's co-actor Barry (James Corden).
Then he has an idea: "We'll just become star activists!"
"The Prom"
Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman are in a crisis: their new and expensive Broadway show has proven to be a big flop and causes a career turnaround.
It is Ryan Murphy's adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name.
Source: Netflix
First world hunger and poverty are in the room, but are rejected as “too big” - and too unsexy, one might add.
Instead, they agree on a more easily solvable problem: A lesbian schoolgirl in conservative Indiana wanted to
go to
the
prom
with her friend
.
The school's parents then voted in unison to cancel the celebration altogether.
This part of the plot is based on a true story.
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That same night, the critically written off celebrity team, which also consists of top-class world stars such as Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, James Corden and Andrew Rannells in real life, packs its bags and travels to Indiana to meet the previously unknown girl (also here in a double sense: in the film as well as in real life, Emma and the personification of Jo Ellen Pellman are not known until this appearance) to make her famous.
An activist project is to be set in motion that assures the student of her right to participate in the prom, while at the same time polishing up the image of the musical stars.
The egocentric self-reflection and the constant circling around one's own show biz are possibly in the nature of the musical genre - if not Hollywood - that recently also led “La La Land” behind the scenes of the film and theater scene, although not New York, but LA , and thus placed itself in the tradition of the classic "Singin 'in the Rain".
"Straight people also love musicals"
Glittering clothes, pink infrared masks, Nicole Kidman's legs, choir singing in the shopping center, cheerleading dances, fraternity choirs, fluttering jazz hands, Meryl Streep's lipstick, it's all so camp and genre-typical that it's surprising that we're going to a musical for so long explicitly queer act had to wait.
“Straight people love musicals too,” says DeeDee, who thinks a fairy tale.
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Almost every song here is about being a lesbian, sometimes metaphorically “love your neighbor”, sometimes explicitly: “We'll help the little lesbian whether she wants it or not”, and the few songs and scenes that are obviously about something else don't seem any less queer than the rest - on the contrary.
Susan Sontag described Camp as a seriousness that fails because it is always “too much”.
Fantastic, glamorous, naive excess.
The climax of the film is a duet between Emma and Angie: Nicole Kidman's glamorous performance, in which she creates a dazzling plea for more “Zazz” (when Angie first heard the word, she knew what it was without even knowing it was meant, and thanks to Kidman's brilliant performance, the audience now knows it too).
With this performance, unparalleled in her career, Nicole Kidman could follow in Laura Dern's footsteps, who was declared a queer icon in a viral hit last year by the “Gay Men's Choir of Los Angeles”.
It seems sympathetic that the celebrity quartet does not try
to act
woker
as it is and can even be activism after
barely
two days.
Diva Dee Dee praises the “LGBQ teen” and immediately afterwards warily admits: “I was way too angry to google what these letters stand for.” That is not problematic.
A film that pretends to be perfect actionism in which no initial mistakes are (may) be problematic would be problematic.
Mass choirs despite Corona
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At a time when theaters and cinemas are closed,
The Prom
comes in at the
right place.
Not only as a feel-good evening program, but as a declaration of love to the theater and as - kitschy only works if you allow it - a reminder of the identity-creating power of communal dancing and singing.
Because a musical without mass performances has not become this either, although the shooting took place during the Covid-19 restrictions on public life.
Allusions to disinfectants and a terrible flu could not resist the makers.
Noteworthy is a scene that shows various young people around the world, each staring at their screens alone at home to hear Emma's message being sung, and each of them joining the YouTube choir in the privacy of their own apartment agrees.
Ryan Murphy's decision to publish his film on Netflix corresponds with Emma's decision to make her story accessible to everyone online.
She consequently cancels a large-scale television appearance.
Empty Activism?
Despite all media self-reflection and progressive questioning of norms, one premise remains untouched: The necessity of the prom, which traditionally represents the climax of every high school film.
Not a single figure doubts this institution and its inherent narrow-mindedness.
When Emma, when asked what she's going to wear to the prom, asks, “Does that matter?”, Her ignorance earns indignant looks, gasping gasps and suppressed giggles even from her celebrity allies.
In other words: the queerness of the film only goes so far as to offer previously excluded minorities a place at the table - that is the message that Ryan Murphy wants to spread, as he announced in an interview with “Variety”.
But whether there is a table at all that you want to sit at, or whether it is rather rotten and brittle,
The Prom
leaves these questions
unaffected.
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The fact that the central relationship is not just a lesbian one, but also one between a white
person
and a
Person of Color
(Ariana DeBose; also stunning: Kerry Washington, who plays her mother) ignores the problematic “color blindness” blessed with Script totally.
While the resistance that the couple faces because of their homosexuality testify to a blatant backwardness, Indiana in
The Prom appears
as an ethnically realized utopia.
Is the film telling us that America has
a homophobia problem
in the year George Floyd and worldwide
Black Lives Matter
demonstrations, but not a racism problem?
Or were the filmmakers simply afraid that a double focus on gender and ethnicity could overwhelm the viewer?
DeeDee and Gang, whose actions are motivated by the fatal slavery of their Broadway show, have to face renewed criticism during the course of the film: "Maybe you'd better let the activism rest and stick with acting." It would be too easy for yourself, Ryan Murphy's comedy to turn a rope out of its own quote.
After all, she also delivers her absolution at the same time: It is not at all a bad thing that the celebrities only wanted to help Emma to get better at the Tony Awards, which are politically trimmed for diversity, the student consoles.