ZOLA
Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: C-
Do yourself a favor, save yourself the time, trouble, and money and just click here to read the original Twitter thread on which this movie Zola is based. The original tweets, first posted in 2015, have since been deleted from Twitter, but we all know now we can rely on someone saving screenshots. Just be sure not to make the same mistake I did and click the “Next” button, which actually takes you to a different, unrelated post. Just scroll down and you’ll see every screenshot, all 148 tweets, which frankly make for a far better experience than watching the movie.
I mean, the movie is . . . fine, I guess. The first tweet is verbatim the first line in the movie: “Y’all wanna. hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” The thing is, that is absolutely an accurate description of the twitter thread. The movie, on the other hand, is neither long (86 minutes) but still manages to drag, or even remotely suspenseful. On the contrary, it’s unlike possibly any other movie I have ever seen, in that it is packed . . . with filler.
Zola could have made a truly fantastic, thirty-minute episode of, say, an anthology TV series about people’s crazy stories. Maybe even with a focus on sex workers’ crazy stories. Every one of the jaw dropping twists and turns in the story, countless though they are, could have been tightened up into that time frame. Maybe director and co-writer Janicza Bravo thought that would be too overwhelming to viewers? Except the whole point of that story is how chaotic it is.
It’s true that sometimes I complain about too much happening in a movie, and how it never takes time to breathe. The difference is, for maybe three quarters of its run time Zola is nothing but the breathing. We get slow shots of Zola (Taylour Paige) and her new stripper friend Stefani (Riley Keough, playing the young woman who in real life was named Jessica) putting on makeup in the same mirror together, or a montage of these two with Jessica’s boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and who will turn out to be Stefani’s pimp (Colman Domingo), on their 20-hour drive to what Zola has been told is a lucrative dancing gig. There’s a scene where colored lines suddenly appear over Zola’s forehead as it otherwise fades to black, as though she’s having an out of body experience. There’s also a scene in a gas station bathroom with a crane shot from directly above, showing Zola and Stefani peeing in neighboring toilet stalls, passing toilet paper to each other under the wall. When that particular scene, which was very short, ended, I thought to myself, Why the fuck did I need to see that? I thought at first that I should give the movie the benefit of the doubt, and maybe something in the plotting will reveal it to be more relevant than it appeared. Instead, I’m still wondering.
The pimp’s name in the movie is X, and for some reason he is portrayed in a far more villainous fashion than he ever was in Zola’s original Twitter thread—as in, repeatedly threatening to Zola directly, as she gets roped into tagging along on Stefanie’s nights of doing sex work. More than once you wonder if X is going to physically assault her; the man is very menacing, in a way he was never portrayed in the original Twitter thread. Ironically, the end of the Twitter thread reveals that man to have been a horrible man indeed, to extremes actually never made explicit in the film: kidnapping of underage girls and links to murder. This, after the tweets portray Zola as being a lot more complicit in the weekend shenanigans than she is as a character in the film.
To be fair, the film begins with title cards that say “most of this is true,” basically acknowledging the artistic license it takes, and the vast majority of the major beats of the story are indeed lifted directed from the original account. (I immediately went to find that Twitter thread when I got home, just so I could find out.) There are some fascinating directions the film goes when it comes to racial dynamics, as Zola is a Black woman and Stefani is a white woman who oozes Black cultural appropriation, particularly with her “black accent.”
It can’t be denied that there is plenty to unpack with this film, ripe for discussion. It’s just poorly edited. Honestly, they could have taken a whole lot more artistic license and just added more stuff to make the film compelling on a consistent basis from beginning to end, maybe then simply saying “loosely based on a true story.” What we got instead, it’s like they were too concerned with being as close to the real story as possible, except that those 148 tweets cover an entire weekend, and if you’re going to adapt a written account of something into a feature film, you really need the full text to be more than just roughly 4500 words (that amounts to, say, nine pages).
I am intrigued by both of these main characters, both as they existed in real life and as they exist fictionalized on film. The women who portray them are more than competent (although to be honest, Nicholas Braun as possibly mentally ill boyfriend Derrek gives arguably the best performance), and make me want to know more about them and their bananas situation. Even as Zola goes back and forth in her resentment versus support of Stefani: at one point she retakes her photos for her, and reposts ads so she makes $500 per client instead of $100. None of these characters are perfect or simple or incapable of being their own brand of a mess, although I suppose I do think it’s cool that real-life Zola was so involved in making the film she got Executive Producer credit. I just think she would have been better served in a different medium.
The story is incredible, the movie isn’t.
Overall: C+