‘The Prom': Ryan Murphy Fans Rejoice, While the Rest of Us Shriek in Horror [Review]

Based on the 2018 Broadway musical and directed by unabashed showman Ryan Murphy, “The Prom” starts off strongly, with a kind of self-aware mockery of itself, as we are introduced to a quartet of washed-up NYC musical theater actors: Dee Dee, an aging legendary actress (Meryl Streep); Barry, a goofy sideman (James Corden); Trent, a pretentious Juilliard grad bartender (Andrew Rannells); and Angie, a 20-year “Chicago” chorus girl (Nicole Kidman).

You can tell “The Prom” was a broadway musical in that the big moments in Murphy’s film are the musical numbers and not the dramatics. Much like the rest of Murphy’s oeuvre, the emotions ring false, the visuals are colorfully ugly, and the attitudes morally superior.

The Prom’s villainous figure is Mrs. Greene, president of the Parents Teacher’s Association in a small rural Indiana town, played by Kerry Washington, she cancels the local high school’s prom when it is learned that one of the students, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), was planning on attending the event with her mysterious girlfriend. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Greene, her daughter Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) is the girl that has won Emma’s heart.

Meanwhile, all four of our washed-up thespians, after the failed premiere of their new Broadway show, sit at a bar, drinking their martinis, and read about Emma’s story on Twitter,. A light bulb flickers in their heads, they decide to adopt her fight as their own cause, the publicity can only be positive, right? here’s no business like show business, right? Hopping on a bus to Indiana, the rambling narrative of “The Prom” commences, so does its sugar-coated storytelling hidden underneath a facade of preachy tolerance and inclusion

It’s hard to be moved by a film so deeply self-congratulatory, but that’s part of the Murphy brand. The best humor in “The Prom” comes in the form of musical theater in-jokes, particularly in the film’s more amusing first hour. but it all runs at a staggeringly self-indulgent 131 minutes. The result is a uber-schizoid experience, a film unsure about itself, the tonal shifts are jarring and damn-near abrasive. Murphy doesn’t seem to understand competent mise-en-scene, his love of musicals is all fine and dandy, but he’s never really found a way to translate it to the screen in cinematic fashion. “The Prom” feels like TV and maybe that’s why it might play like gangbusters to the mainstream when it streams on Netflix starting next week.

The cast assembled here is a dreamy one; Streep is the standout, she hams it up in the role of Dee Dee, the Broadway diva legend with an ego the size of the Brooklyn Bridge, Keegan-Michael Key shows up as Tom, the school’s principal standing with Emma to fight for a prom, he also manages to get all hot and bothered with Dee Dee. Kidman, game and glamorous though she is, has minimal screentime here, she’s miscast and misused in ways I have never seen before in her impressive 3-decade career. Clunkiest of all, however, it’s disorienting to see Corden, a late-night show host, heterosexual in real-life, take on the role of a flamboyantly gay character.

Through it all, Murphy is so enamored by his own artifice that he doesn’t even bother trying to bring three-dimensionality to the small rural Indiana town the film is set in, a community of people we know nothing about except that they really don’t like homosexuality. Nuance or insight isn’t what this movie is about, no, to fully be won over by “The Prom” you have to give in to the kitschy decors, the irony-driven songs, and the egomaniacs at the center of its plot. Long after Murphy’s film drops its cutesy cynicism, the overblown musical numbers relentlessly continue, the show does go on, but we are given no reason to stay.

Score: D