Prom is a brilliant satirical deconstruction of the high school genre and the American cultural landscape, which is surprising considering the vapid nature of its advertising campaign and the apparent banality of its concept.
Director Joe Nussbaum (Sydney White) must be commended for his nerve and audacity. Taken in any other context, Prom would be considered an excruciating trip through Disney’s commercial vision of high school.
Nussbaum and writer Katie Wech (Dead Zone) have crafted a supremely deadpan twist on the conventional high school movie. For its entirety, the story plods on ironically through lazy cliché, hackneyed dialogue and thin characterization.
Prom features an ensemble, Traffic-esque odyssey through the horrors of modern-day secondary education. The world’s most vapid and snobby teenager Nova (Aimee Teegarden, Scream 4) suffers an emotional breakdown after she is put in charge of prom decorations when the previously handcrafted decor gets burned to a crisp. Also, her crush, Brandon (Jonathan Keltz, Breach), declines to ask her to prom.
Enter rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold du jour Jesse Richter (Thomas McDonell, The Forbidden Kingdom), a thinly drawn and loosely developed caricature of James Dean brought in via deus ex machina to help Nova save prom and learn how to not be so stuck-up.
Other key players in Prom’s convoluted story include nebbish dweeb-with-a-heart-of-gold Lloyd Taylor (Nicholas Braun, Sky High), who is trying desperately to find a date for prom; a creepy quasi-pedophilic love pentagon involving varsity football star Tyler (DeVaughn Nixon, Monster Heroes), his girlfriend Jordan (Kylie Bunbury, Days of Our Lives), junior varsity football players and snobbish music hipsters Corey (Cameron Monaghan, Click) and Lucas (newcomer Nolan Sotillo) and object of everyone’s affection Simone (Danielle Campbell, The Poker House); and Nova’s many, many friends, mostly notably Ali Gomez (newcomer Janelle Ortiz, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Rebecca Black).
Were this any other movie, the story would be criticized as needlessly complicated and poorly conceived, but Wech’s keen insight into the overly commercialized and overly romanticized world of Disney high schools makes the story bearable.
Which is a good thing, too, because if Wech and Nussbaum weren’t actually satirizing Disney high school movies and really were trying to write a legitimate, serious take on high school, the script would be criticized as something a hack fresh out of Scriptwriting 101 would come up with.
Case in point: The movie opens on an almost unbearably meta voiceover by Nova, who intones solemnly that “Prom is our night!” Any other movie would completely have missed the irony in the fact that Disney has just commercialized prom, but not Wech and Nussbaum.
The unstoppable duo have their sights set far higher than simply commenting on the hypocrisy that is the Disney High School Musical factory. Instead, Wech and Nussbaum have crafted a film that charts the deterioration of the American psyche from the 1950s through present day.
Nussbaum cleverly alludes to both the Vietnam War and California’s Zodiac killings as a turning point for American culture. The fire that destroys the prom decorations is obviously intended as a reference to the napalm deployed in Indochina.
The Zodiac murders are referenced in a gag where the socially inept Lloyd asks a girl out to prom via sticking a message comprised of ransom-note letters on his potential date’s locker.
Much credit must also be given to Nussbaum’s critique of post-modern cinema through his ironic use of handheld and digital cinematography and self-aware insertion of social networking puns and witty remarks.
Aiding Nussbaum’s almost nauseatingly dry and post-post-modern critique of Hollywood cinematography is a stunningly insipid and unoriginal soundtrack. With more of a mishmash of chart-topping pop music than a coherent score, Nussbaum once again drives home his critique of both modern society and modern cinema.
Nussbaum also pulls carefully calculated (read: poor) performances out of his cast. It’s a brave decision considering how in any other context the stilted, robotic line deliveries from the cast would make audiences question why the cast deserved to belong in a wide-release motion picture in the first place.
Nussbaum is truly a courageous visionary of our time, having casted actors and actresses with all the chemistry and charisma of toothpicks being rubbed together. In Wech, Nussbaum has found his muse, a writer who is fearless enough to insert tripe in place of dialogue in service to the grand theme of the movie.
If Prom is any indication of the way the movie industry is moving forward, we are truly living in enlightened times.
RATING: 0.5 out of 5 stars
chzhang@umdbk.com
