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Meryl Streep, James Corden in "The Prom": Broadway stars in crisis travel to the provinces
Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon / NETFLIX
Strange when, after about an hour of watching a film, you wonder where one of the three stars actually went to.
And what role he should play at all.
Nicole Kidman looks in the first half of the Netflix musical "The Prom" every now and then only to find out that her mission has still not come.
She wears smart hats, that's all you can say.
Then at some point it actually does exist, the really big Kidman number.
That one should pay attention to her long legs is kindly pointed out in the dialogue.
She is dancing with a young woman who is being bullied for being a lesbian and wants to encourage her.
But the duet cannot unfold because the hysterical cut chops up the body into its individual parts.
There is hardly anything left of grace and elegance.
The Netflix production "The Prom", which is based on a stage musical from 2016, is a very shrill charity event.
Director Ryan Murphy, who was celebrated for his TV series "Glee", travels with three Broadway stars (played by Kidman, Meryl Streep and James Corden), who have had their best days, to the American provinces, to ultra-conservative Indiana .
It should be a good-humored culture clash.
Shrill culture clash
A dialogue between the camps, sung and danced, bridging the gap with bold leaps.
If you can tell of deadly ethnic clashes within US society in the musical, as in "West Side Story", why not also talk about reconciliation and understanding, about respect and tolerance?
»The Prom« - a huge boom of diversity?
The authors of the musical have come up with a conflict that is not too big, but not too small either;
who causes trouble, but not war.
Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman) and her friend Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) want to go to high school prom as a couple.
This causes such a scandal that the celebration threatens to be canceled.
The Broadway stars want to save them.
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Actresses Ariana DeBose, Jo Ellen Pellman: Big boom of diversity
Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon / NETFLIX
The Prom is an American institution, the importance of which is revealed to very few Europeans.
It is astonishing enough that the question of who goes to prom with whom in which dress is repeatedly declared an existential problem in American cinema.
As the center of a film about discrimination and exclusion, the prom comes across as ridiculous.
This film is only really snappy in the moments when it makes fun of the vanities of Broadway stars.
The international understanding numbers, on the other hand, often seem simple-minded and naive.
When a few young people who reject homosexuality and refer to the Bible are reading the riot act while dancing, then it should be understood all over the world.
Propaganda for a good cause.
The whole exaggerated cheerfulness of the film, the caricature-like exaggeration of the characters, cannot hide the fact that he prances around with the utmost caution around every faux pas that stands on the way.
Don't make a mistake, don't joke at the expense of any minority.
That makes "The Prom" predictable in a downright grotesque way.
It's also bad that he sinks into sentimentality in the moments when he wants to be particularly profound.
When James Corden, of all people, in the role of a gay star, who escaped his narrow-minded parents' home in the provinces, meets his mother again after many years, the film literally spoils the actor's abilities.
Actually, it is not a bad idea to move the genre of musicals, which has been shaped by many gays and developed into a great art form, into a homophobic environment.
But in "The Prom" the story of the Broadway stars in crisis and that of a lesbian girl in Indiana is at no time unified.
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