One More Time, a small-scale drama set in the Hamptons now playing on demand in your living room, is a beautiful mess. The infectiously watchable Christopher Walken plays a 70-year-old singing star named Paul Lombard desperate to stage a comeback. A spectacular Amber Heard plays his 31-year-old daughter Jude, an extraordinarily talented and aimless underachiever oppressed by the old man’s loving, careless, solipsistic shadow.
Their relationship is perfectly encapsulated by a scene in which they perform the great and quiet Frank and Nancy Sinatra duet “Something Stupid” and Paul, who simply cannot share the spotlight, begins to sing far more loudly than Jude and ruins the moment.
They are wonderful, the characters are wonderful, and so is writer-director Robert Edwards’s careful delineation of the complex cross-currents in the Lombard family. There’s a dinner-table scene in which we see the constant efforts at one-upsmanship among Paul, Jude, and his more dutiful daughter Corinne (Kelli Garner), who is treated like a second-tier child because she didn’t go into showbiz or inherit the family gift. It’s so good and piercing it justifies the movie all by itself.
So why do I say it’s a mess? First, because the characters make no sociological sense in 2016. Paul Lombard is, we are told, a sex-symbol crooner, whose albums are used to set the mood for seductions even now. The movie begins with Jude having to tell her latest one-night-stand to turn Lombard off as they’re making out. (He doesn’t know who she is.) He’s a Sinatra-Johnny Mathis-Tony Bennett type—and Bennett experienced exactly the kind of career upturn Paul is hoping for in 1994 when MTV had him perform one of its live “Unplugged” concerts at the age of 67 and the recording went platinum.
But the movie asks us to believe that Lombard became a huge Sinatra-like star in the mid-1960s/early-’70s, and that’s just off. The enduring solo acts of Lombard’s prime were rockers or folk rockers striving for raw authenticity, not Jewish lounge singers who changed their names to sound Italian. The walls of Paul’s house are lined with beautifully designed album covers showing his efforts to be relevant through the years—a psychedelic disc here, a disco turn there. They’re funny but they just make matters far more confusing.
One More Time should have been set in 1996 rather than 2016, and I suspect the screenplay originally was. (Either that, or the casting of Walken caused Edwards to tailor the part to Walken’s own singing style, which is far more Broadway than rock.) But it’s expensive to set movies in the past—it means securing old cars and spending on production design. As a result, low-budget American indies often try to fudge this, with problematic results.
A mostly terrific little film with Steve Carell called The Way Way Back was set in 2013 but was clearly about the year 1983, so when it featured behavior appropriate for the earlier day but not for our day—like a 13-year-old biking off by himself for the day in a summer resort community with no adult knowing where he was going and no iPhone in his pocket—the movie’s mood was shattered.
One More Time has this problem in spades, not least in the characterization of Jude, whose style and manner—her addiction to casual sex, her alcohol abuse, her affair with her shrink—have an oddly dated quality to them. She is basically a riot grrrl of the 1990s; indeed, her one career success came when she performed with a hardcore punk band of a sort that hasn’t really existed since the ’90s.
What’s more, One More Time‘s storyline seems to have been shuffled around in the editing room; scenes don’t quite seem to be taking place in the proper chronological order, suggesting that Edwards was acting a little like a novelist using the editing room to construct a second draft of his beautifully observed but structurally unsound tale.
Mess though it is, One More Time is nonetheless a lovely, intelligent, and splendidly acted piece of work, and well worth your attention.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
