Amber Heard recently complained about her supermodel good looks getting her typecast in eye-candy roles in lowbrow slasher flicks and action thrillers. Maybe, but it might have helped her cause if she hadn’t given terrible performances in terrible movies like Paranoia and 3 Days to Kill. In her defense, the Austin native has shown some indications that she can be useful out of that box in movies like Magic Mike XXL and Pineapple Express. Her lead role in the music drama One More Time is a further effort to take on roles that require her to actually act, but it yields mixed results.
She portrays Jude, a pink-haired struggling singer-songwriter who’s kicked out of her New York City apartment for missing her rent. She washes up at the Hamptons McMansion owned by her dad Paul (Christopher Walken), a Sinatraesque jazz crooner who became famous in the late 1960s. She ponders her next move while dealing with the crowd there, which includes Paul’s sixth wife (Ann Magnuson) and Jude’s ex-boyfriend (Hamish Linklater) who’s now married to her older sister (Kelli Garner).
Heard does seem relieved to be playing a character who’s sullen and frustrated, and she makes a good fist of the dinner-table conversations when she subtly laces into the people around her. She comes off less well, though, in the cliché-ridden arguments when Jude explodes in outright anger at her dad’s wretched parenting. The actress does her own singing (most notably on rueful songs “Ludicrous Heart” and “Montreal”) and does all right for someone with no prior experience, though we don’t hear the outsize musical talent that Paul claims that Jude possesses. Nor can she make sense of how Jude figures out how to stop her drunken one-night-stands and get her life together, which is what the movie’s supposed to be about.
She doesn’t get much help from filmmaker Robert Edwards. He and former Psychedelic Furs bassist Joe McGinty co-write some nifty songs like Paul’s comeback number “When I Live My Life Over Again” (this movie’s original title, by the way), whose lyrics reference “Je ne regrette rien” and “My Way” without straining. Edwards also conjures up a nice gag at the beginning, when Jude finds one of her dad’s songs coming on while she’s trying to have sex with a random guy. However, loose ends are lying around everywhere in the plot, and Paul’s previous careers in psychedelic rock, reggae, and hip-hop make no sense given that the Paul we see hates all music except his beloved big-band swing. There have been more than a few movies about living with and getting out from under a narcissistic showbiz type, and this one adds nothing to our understanding.
One last note: One More Time opened last year’s Lone Star Film Festival, and there’s a line that surely caught the festival organizers’ attention. When Jude’s sister recalls their dad’s fifth wife from Dallas, Paul corrects her: “It was Fort Worth. They get upset down there if you mix ‘em up.”
[box_info]One More Time
Starring Amber Heard and Christopher Walken. Written and directed by Robert Edwards. Rated R.[/box_info]
