The Musical ★

Among the usually above-par selection of Sundance titles, films like Giselle Bonilla‘s crude debut feel as if the program coordinators were bound by some paradoxical impulse to also include bad films, just to bring some variety to the schedule. But even in that sense, the uneven mix of comedy and intrigue doesn’t quite succeed. The story is about spiteful theater teacher Doug (Will Brill) who sabotages a school musical performance to take revenge on principal Brady (Rob Lowe at a career low) for “stealing” his former girlfriend Abigail (Gillian Jacobs). In Doug’s mind, and that of screenwriter Alexander Heller, women are passive property of men who can claim ownership, even if the ex-partner in question left them before entering a new relationship. 

Patriarchal tropes like this might feel accidental at first, but as the aggressive plot progresses, it becomes clear they are anything but involuntary tonal missteps. Another example: Doug wants to leave shoddy school productions with literary minor talents behind to make it big in New York as a playwright. However, a white, straight, cis man like him is barred from the success he’s supposedly owed by diversity initiatives. Critique like this has never been timely or accurate, but in a political climate where DEI programs are eliminated, queer books banned from libraries, and immigrants vilified, they amount to an uncomfortable pandering to alt-right taste. Such reactionary bits crowd the plot, chronicling Doug’s staging of his very own interpretation of West Side Story. 

When a talented Hispanic girl is thwarted at the audition for the role of Maria in favor of a more complicit white girl, her futile attempts to participate become a nasty running gag. Blunt racism against a sixth grader doesn’t just put the bar for humor low—it literally glues it to the ground. Nevertheless, Bonilla and Heller manage to dig their way beneath that level by channeling the scenario into an extended 9/11 joke. The argument against this is not that 9/11 parodies should be taboo. Some shows like South Park have done it, and done it right. But The Musical is light years away from successful satire and subversion. The whole 9/11 thing boils down to one punch line.

Said cheap payoff is that the kids aren’t singing and dancing as Sharks and Jets, but as Rudy Giuliani, bin Laden, and George W. Bush. It’s a tired gag that gets mercilessly repeated, as if the director wanted to indoctrinate her audience into believing this was funny. Well, it’s not. It’s also not very well acted, with the child actors easily outdoing the grownups. Jacobs and Lowe seem to have made a secret agreement to just read their lines mechanically. Who could blame them? Tony-winner Brill tries hard to be both smart and smarmy, but fails. Settings look as cheap as the cardboard Twin Towers on stage. The songs could have been the saving grace but remain fragments, accompanied by as many ostentatiously offensive lyrics as possible.

It all ends where everyone knew from the first scene it would go, though little of that ending makes any sense. Lack of logic would be forgivable if there was at least some chaotic fun in Bonilla’s bizarrely backward teacher tantrum. But the only truly joyful moment with The Musical is forgetting it as quickly as possible.