131 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Netflix
Four self-absorbed Broadway stars descend on small-town Indiana to defend a lesbian teen barred from bringing her girlfriend to prom. They are there to fix their public image, not the girl. The cause is real. The movie is a billboard.
The Prom is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical about four fading New York theater stars who hijack a culture-war fight in a small Indiana town. A high school cancels its prom rather than let a lesbian student attend with her girlfriend. The stars need a cause to rehabilitate their reputations. They pick this one because it photographs well. The film wants to be a sincere plea for acceptance and a satire of celebrity narcissism at the same time. It commits to neither.
Meryl Streep plays Dee Dee Allen with a diva’s vanity and precise comic timing, landing the joke that she herself is the joke. James Corden plays Barry Glickman as a parade of mannerisms and broad gestures that flatten the character into caricature, and the performance announces itself in every scene without finding a person underneath. Nicole Kidman plays Angie Dickinson with a wry chill the script never uses. Ariana DeBose plays Alyssa Greene with a real ache that the surrounding spectacle keeps drowning out, and Kerry Washington plays her mother Mrs. Greene as the town’s engine of disapproval. Keegan-Michael Key plays Principal Tom Hawkins grounded and sincere, and Andrew Rannells plays Trent Oliver with theater-kid bravado.
Ryan Murphy directs with the saturated, high-gloss visual style he brings to everything. The cinematography floods every frame with primary colors and the camera never stops gliding, which turns intimate numbers into product shots. Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin adapt their own stage book and keep too much of it. The musical numbers are staged for maximum sparkle and minimum stakes. The editing cuts on spectacle instead of emotion, so every song builds to a key change and a confetti drop rather than a feeling.
The Prom believes in its message and trusts the audience not at all. It states its themes, sings them, then restates them in case anyone missed it. The genuine story buried inside it belongs to the two girls and the parents who fear them. The film keeps cutting away from them to watch movie stars learn to be better people. That trade is the whole problem.