‘Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial’ Review: A He Said/She Said Schlock ‘Rashomon’ That’s Really an All-Too-Standard TV-Movie

“Scorching Take: The Depp/Heard Trial” sounds just like the tawdriest of TV-movies, with any vestige of disgrace left on the cutting-room flooring. It positively is that, but it’s price noting that this precise kind factor has been round for many years. It simply didn’t used to return off the meeting line fairly so shortly. Within the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the panorama was affected by made-for-TV motion pictures that jumped on tabloid-ready tales — The Jacksons! Jim Jones! The Menendez brothers! The Beverly Hills madam! The rape of Richard Beck! — and squeezed out no matter juice was left in them. “Scorching Take” isn’t a lot totally different. It feeds on our collective want, which is seemingly limitless, to see adequate-but-not-never-good-enough actors performing out the notorious scenes we’ve learn or heard about, bringing these squalid episodes to life. Besides that the entire drawback with this type is that the dramatized model hardly ever finally ends up trying half as actual as what was in our imaginations.

The title of “Scorching Take: The Depp/Heard Trial” makes the film sound loopier than it’s. It’s possible you’ll assume you’re about to see a whole staged model of the trial we mainly simply noticed, as if watching Mark Hapka and Megan Davis, who play Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, seated on the witness stand reciting the tidbits of testimony that one way or the other grew to become memes earlier than they have been out of Depp and Heard’s mouths would one way or the other present a frisson of revelation that watching the unique trial didn’t.

However no. “Scorching Take” makes use of the trial as a form of framing system — and sure, it does preserve returning to the courtroom personas (Johnny’s Kentucky-meets-the-Actors Studio stentorian gravity and self-involved Zen stammering; Amber’s company control-freak guardedness) that all of us grew to like a lot. But the movie will then minimize to a flashback triggered by the snippet of testimony in query. The center of the film is its episodic portrayal of the Depp/Heard romance-gone-crash-and-burn, a cleaning soap opera on dangerous medication and even worse recall.

For those who assume you’re going to get some model — or at the least an interpretation — of “what really occurred,” you’re out of luck. As an alternative of selecting sides, the film, cued to Johnny and Amber’s contradictory testimony, dramatizes her model of the story…after which his…then hers…then his… “Scorching Take” is like “E! True Hollywood Story: The Depp/Heard Trial” acted out on a budget — a he mentioned/she mentioned schlock “Rashomon” with the contrasting variations of what occurred overlapping one another, in order that by the top we hardly know which approach is up. However we’ve gotten to see most of our pet moments come rotely alive.

Right here’s Johnny and Amber as they meet, all lovey-dovey, on the set of “The Rum Diaries,” sharing the crimson wine he drinks prefer it was the blood of Dracula. Right here’s Johnny charming Amber along with his Brando impersonation, bedazzling her along with his decorative masculine charisma, as he’s woken up by her adoring gaze. Right here they’re already entering into little tiffs about issues just like the film roles Amber is taking (he calls them “demeaning”). Right here, proper after their wedding ceremony, in the midst of her bachelorette social gathering, is a serious combat, as a result of Johnny doesn’t like that Amber and her girlfriends are doing medication (coming from the drinker he’s, that’s fairly a high-handed piece of hypocrisy) and he says that she lied to him concerning the intercourse scene she did with Eddie Redmayne. (The best way the movie portrays it, Johnny is so jealous that he experiences even intercourse scenes as in the event that they have been betrayals.)

Extra significantly, right here’s Johnny, in a re-enactment of Amber’s testimony, turning into bodily abusive after she makes a joke on the expense of his Wino Ceaselessly tattoo. And right here, in a re-enactment of Johnny’s testimony, is the way more tender, fully unabusive encounter about that tattoo that he described. Right here’s Amber on the crimson carpet with scars on her arm (however are they actual?), and right here, because the 85-minute film veers into its climactic residence stretch, is severed-fingertip-gate and poop-gate.    

For those who received hooked on the trial and watched the entire goddamn factor (true confession: I did), you inevitably, over time, developed a psychological profile of every individual, which led you to resolve who was mendacity about what, and to give you an interpretation of the place you thought the trial deserved to land, by way of authorized justice. However actually, the trial was a warped lens that each one of us peered by means of, attempting to absorb the total image of Depp and Heard’s clearly poisonous relationship. (This tended to end in such pinpoint gems of trenchant evaluation as, “They have been each fucked up.”) “Scorching Take” is sort of a second warped lens slapped on prime of the primary one. It doesn’t make clear; it literalizes but blurs.

How are the actors? As Depp, Mark Hapka appears to be like the half (kind of, from sure angles, typically), however not likely, as a result of how may anybody? Hapka can also be just a little too impartial within the courtroom episodes — the true Johnny leaned into these theatrical low tones — however he captures, within the romantic scenes, how Johnny was a romantic about every little thing, however solely on his personal (unromantic) dominating phrases. Megan Davis does a convincing impersonation of Heard, however to the extent that the trial caught Heard in duplicitous statements, like her insistence that she’d fulfilled her pledge to make a $3.5 million donation to the ACLU, the movie doesn’t actually enable Davis to indicate you ways that facet of Amber labored.

The actual (dangerous) joke of “Scorching Take” isn’t that it’s the scuzziest TV-movie ever made or something like that. Fairly the opposite: As ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation sleaze goes, it’s pretty customary. But it surely does one mildly revolutionary factor. It takes the social-media circus that surrounded the Depp/Heard trial and works it proper into the film. It retains intercutting staged variations of postings from a pro-Amber YouTube pundit, a Johnny Depp teen-girl stan, and the varied different DIY commentators and satirists who turned the trial into not only a riveting piece of actuality theater however essentially the most telling Warholian sideshow of the twenty first century. Its ruling ethos was, “Everybody who has an opinion of the Depp/Heard trial might be well-known for 15 milliseconds.” That’s a complete lot of power-to-the-people tabloid suggestions, and whilst “Scorching Take” acknowledges it, it makes this film only one extra drop in an ocean of noise.